Wife of Irishman killed in Boeing crash welcomes US court ruling
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The wife of an Irishman killed in a preventable airplane crash in 2019 has welcomed a US court decision to treat the families of lost loved ones as “crime victims”.
Naoise Connolly Ryan, whose husband Mick Ryan, a humanitarian worker, was killed in a Boeing 737 Max crash said families are waiting for guidance on the full impact of the court ruling.
A US federal judge has ruled that the deaths of 346 people in two aviation disasters in 2018 and 2019 were the direct result of criminal behaviour on the part of Boeing and its leaders.
US District Judge Reed O’Connor also found that the US Justice Department violated the rights of 346 passengers killed in two crashes when it struck a deal in 2021 that spared Boeing from criminal prosecution.
In a strongly-worded finding, the judge said: “The court finds that the tragic loss of life that resulted from the two airplane crashes was a reasonably foreseeable consequence of Boeing’s conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Mick Ryan, the Clare-born deputy chief engineer at the World Food Programme, died when a Boeing 737 Max crashed six minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, killing all 157 people on board.
Just five months before, on October 28, a 737 Max, operated by Lion Air in Indonesia, crashed moments after leaving Jakarta airport, killing all 189 people on board.
A congressional investigation later found that the crashes were “the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration”.
Last year, Boeing was fined $2.5bn by the US Justice Department in a settlement called a deferred prosecution agreement. The deal was widely criticised by relatives because nobody was held to account for the deaths of 346 people.
Ms Connolly Ryan welcomed the latest ruling, saying: “Families like mine are the true victims of Boeing’s criminal misconduct, and our views should have been considered before the [US] government gave them a sweetheart deal."
She added that some families were seeking prosecution of Boeing and its executives.