Boeing to pay Kenyan family Sh327m over Ethiopian plane crash

A Kenyan family of a victim of the 2019 Ethiopian Airline crash has agreed to settlement of Sh327 million to drop a court case against American aircraft maker Boeing.

This is the first settlement in a case by Ribbeck Law Chartered which sued Boeing for Sh109 billion on behalf of some families who lost their loved ones in the Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX 2019 crash that killed all 149 people on board.

The US law firm filed a dozen of suits against the aircraft maker in a US Federal Court in Chicago in the aftermath of two fatal crashes involving the same Boeing model plane.

Some of the Ribbeck Law Chartered’s remaining cases from the Boeing 737 Max 8 crash of Lion Air Flight 610 that have not reached settlement will be tried in the US or Indonesia. If tried in Indonesia, a criminal case against Boeing’s officers and its board of directors will be filed.

“We sought and asked for the largest amount possible to be paid as compensation to the families we represent,” Mr von Ribbeck said.

The Nairobi-bound flight crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport killing 149 on board including 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, nine Ethiopians, eight Italians, eight Chinese, eight Americans, seven Britons, seven French citizens, six Egyptians, five Germans, four Indians and four people from Slovakia.

Another plane of the same model was involved in a crash less than five months earlier, when a Lion Air flight crashed into the sea near Indonesia with nearly 190 people on board.

Serious failures

The final report on the Boeing 737 MAX, released in September by a legislative committee in the United States, found “repeated and serious failures” by Boeing and identified the key factors that contributed to the Boeing 737 MAX crash, including design flaws, profit and production priorities at the expense of safety.

The report laid out disturbing revelations about how Boeing—under pressure to compete with Airbus and deliver profits for Wall Street—escaped scrutiny from the FAA, withheld critical information from pilots, and ultimately put planes into service that killed 346 innocent people in the two crashes.