not sure why this same scrutiny does not apply to pro athletes or actors/recording artists.
A good answer would address whether society should tolerate such agreements (corporations get special privileges under the law, so the question of whether they are making good use of those privileges is always on the table) and explore the dynamics that lead large corporations to extend huge salaries to a relatively small pool of people, even though there's lots of evidence that they aren't particularly capable of predicting the value a given individual will deliver.
A golden parachute is a payment to get someone or of the company. It's a way for a company to part with someone without drama, lawsuits, etcetera. And sure, it could also be corruption.
It is not accumulated pensions over 35 years. Obviously. In a "black is not white" kind of way.
I have no particular knowledge of this dude. Maybe he was awful. Maybe he did as well as anyone could have in the circumstances. More likely, somewhere in the middle.
But his pension from more than there decades ago is not a golden parachute, and nobody would ever sign a contract with a three decade claw-back. This guy's total compensation does not sound terribly high by the standards of CEOs of this size organization.
It makes one wonder if the workers should unionize. I do understand multiple companies (Boeing and several suppliers) are mentioned here, so maybe some of them have some kind of union. But the story is a microcosm of our times. A CEO who seems complicit in an episode that killed many and lost the company $13B gets paid enough to relax in luxury forever while the regular people who had nothing to do with the problem or actively fought against it suffer.
To me, the fact that the CEOs contract was agreed upon in advance does not suddenly make this situation fine. Perhaps we need to reformulate massive companies like this as worker owned cooperatives. Certainly in my mind we need to end the huge unequal privilege that executives have, however that should work out.