A federal judge has ruled that families of passengers who perished in the Boeing 737 Max tragedy in Ethiopia may seek compensation for the suffering and fear they endured in the moments prior to the plane crashing nose-down to the ground.
The decision allows the families’ attorneys to invite witnesses to speak about the victims’ suffering prior to the 2019 catastrophe, which resulted in the death of everyone on board.
The decision was announced by the U.S. Boeing, which had contended that evidence regarding the victims’ suffering would be speculative, has suffered a setback according to District Judge Jorge Alonso in Chicago.
The judgement relates to a dispute over financial support for the kin of those killed in the second of two fatal crashes involving Boeing’s best-selling aircraft.
The trial is set to start on June 20. Boeing has agreed not to hold the pilots or anybody else accountable while accepting responsibility for the deaths of the passengers.
In exchange, the families’ attorneys consented not to demand punitive damages from the business.
Compensation for things like funeral costs, lost wages, and the grief experienced by immediate family members will be decided during the trial.
At a hearing last week, Boeing’s attorneys attempted to suppress information regarding the suffering of passengers in the moments leading up to the tragedy.
The evidence, they claimed, would be upsetting and have an unfair effect.
The passengers’ agony and suffering cannot be compensated for under Illinois law, according to Boeing lawyers, because they passed away the moment the plane impacted the ground.
This is true even if the case is being heard in federal court.
The families’ lawyers claim that their clients can’t stop thinking about the terror that their loved ones went through as the plane repeatedly plunged and rose before making its fatal, nearly 700 mph nosedive.
The defense wants to bring witnesses who can attest that the passengers most likely had bodily and psychological harm before the collision.
There will undoubtedly be more debates about the trial’s regulations, including whether to label the crash as an accident.
Robert Clifford, a lawyer for one of the families, stated he wants to refer to the crash’s crater as a crime scene.
In order to avoid criminal punishment for deceiving federal regulators who authorized the Max by withholding information on a flight-control system linked to the crashes, Boeing and the Justice Department agreed a deal in 2021.
The cost of the agreement increased to $2.5 billion when the business paid a $244 million fine and consented to compensate the airlines and victims.
The two Max jet crashes, which occurred shortly after airlines all over the world started employing the aircraft, resulted in a total of 346 fatalities.
All 189 persons on board a Lion Air Max that crashed in Indonesia in October 2018 perished. Six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa, less than five months later, in March 2019, an Ethiopian Airlines Max carrying 149 passengers and eight crew members crashed.
Most of the families who were on the Lion Air plane and many more who were on the Ethiopian plane, including many this week, have reached agreements with Boeing.
However, a trial is set to begin on June 20 in federal court in Chicago as a result of the efforts of several dozen families of individuals who were on the second plane.
Although Boeing’s headquarters are in Arlington, Virginia, the company was first located in Chicago in 2019.
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