(Adnkronos) – A US jury has ordered Boeing to pay 29 million dollars in a civil lawsuit filed by the family of Michael “Mick” Ryan, an Irish UN engineer who died in the crash of a 737 MAX 8 in 2019. Ryan was one of 157 people (including passengers and crew members) who all died in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302 on March 10, 2019, which departed from Addis Ababa airport, Ethiopia, heading towards Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, and crashed six minutes after takeoff. The aircraft, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, had been delivered a few months earlier. That was the second air accident in less than 6 months involving a Boeing 737 MAX, after Lion Air flight 610 crashed shortly after takeoff from Jakarta, Indonesia, in October 2018.
Ryan had worked during the Ebola crisis in Liberia and with Rohingya refugees. A United Nations commemorative page dedicated to Ryan, who was 39 at the time of the incident, also recognized his work in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Ethiopia. The case is one of the last civil lawsuits still pending against Boeing following the two tragic MAX incidents in 2018 and 2019, which together caused the deaths of 346 people.
The vast majority of compensation claims have been settled out of court with agreements whose terms have not been disclosed, but Naoise Ryan’s lawyer, Steven Marks, had described his client as “determined to obtain accountability and justice from a jury and not to accept money directly from Boeing.” Boeing has apologized for the incidents and acknowledged that anti-stall software was involved in both cases.
