US aircraft maker Boeing has struck a deal with the families of the victims of the 737 MAX crash that killed 157 people in March 2019 in Ethiopia and has acknowledged responsibility for the crash, according to indictments filed Wednesday in court in Chicago.
“Boeing is committed to ensuring that all families who have lost loved ones in accidents are fully and fairly compensated,” the company confirmed when asked by Agence France-Presse.
According to Boeing’s “recognition of responsibility”, the agreement will allow the parties to focus on the amount of “adequate compensation” for each family, the petitions say.
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 bound for Nairobi, Kenya, crashed in a field southeast of Addis Ababa six minutes after its 737 MAX took off in March 2019.
This accident, the second in which a type aircraft was involved in a few months, led to the grounding of all 737 MAXs and caused the most serious crisis in the history of the giant American civil and military aircraft industry. It was preceded by the crash of a brand new Lion Air aircraft in Indonesia in October 2018 (189 dead).
The agreement mentioned in the petitions does not specify the amount of compensation.
The families of the victims can file lawsuits in US courts to receive compensation. The 157 people killed were 35 of different nationalities.
The company stressed that the two disasters led it to make “significant changes” in the way it operates “and in the design of the 737 MAX”, in order to “ensure that such accidents will never happen again”.
The 737 MAX, the state-of-the-art version of the legendary medium-haul aircraft first launched in 1967, tarnished the aviation giant’s reputation and cost him billions of dollars.
All aircraft remained grounded for twenty months, until they gradually began flying again by the end of 2020 internationally. More than 200 such passenger planes have now been put back into service.
Ralph Neider, a US politician and consumer rights activist, criticized the deal for not allowing lawyers representing victims’ families to question current and former Boeing executives, among others.
Mr Neider’s niece was among the 157 victims of the disaster.
The agreement also stipulates that lawsuits will be filed against Rosemount Aerospace, which manufactures sensors for the 737 MAX, and against the Rockwell Collins parent company, part of Raytheon Technologies.
In both tragedies, the findings of the air crash investigators who studied them and Boeing itself admitted that the automatic activation of the MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) software played to play a key role in preventing loss of sensory function and external of the fuselage, from which it obtained data on the flight parameters. 737 MAX pilots were not retrained to deal with MCAS-enabled emergencies for cost-saving reasons, as later revealed.
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Source From: Capital
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