Irish widow devastated over decision to not reopen plane crash plea deal
Ethiopia Lahinch, Off Ryan City Dan Addis Boeing Ababa, At Died In A Cork When Minutes Picture: 737 Ryan Taking Crashed Co From 2019 Clare, Husband, Connolly Linehan Naoise Home Her In Max In After Mick Her
Naoise Connolly Ryan, who lost her husband in a preventable Boeing crash in 2019, says she is devastated by a US judge’s decision not to reopen a plea deal.
Speaking in a court in Texas, Judge Reed O’Connor said Boeing’s crime “may properly be considered the deadliest corporate crime in US history”. However, he said he did not have the legal means to challenge the deal, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, which gives the company immunity from prosecution.
“This court has immense sympathy for the victims and loved ones of those who died in the tragic plane crashes resulting from Boeing’s criminal conspiracy,” he said. But he explained the US Congress had not vested his court with the authority to ensure that justice was done in a case like this one.
Boeing pleaded not guilty to a charge of defrauding the US to get regulators to approve the safety of its Max 737 jet. A total of 346 people were killed in two air crashes in 2018 and 2019 when an automated flight-control system — which Boeing did not initially disclose to airlines and pilots — pushed the nose of the plane down because of a faulty sensor reading.
Ms Connolly Ryan’s husband, Mick Ryan, deputy chief engineer at the World Food Programme, and 156 others were killed as a result when a Boeing 737 Max crashed six minutes after take-off from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on March 10, 2019.
Just five months earlier, 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”.
In 2021, Boeing was fined $2.5bn by the US Justice Department, but nobody has ever been held to account for the deaths of 346 people.
Last October, Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that those who died in both disasters should be considered “crime victims”, a development that gave Naoise Connolly Ryan reason to hope that executives in Boeing would finally be held to account. She believes they should face charges of manslaughter.
She travelled to Texas last month to tell the court of the human cost of losing her husband, and father of their two young children, due to what she says is corporate greed.
Another Irishman Paul Kiernan, who lost his partner Joanna Toole in the same crash, also addressed the court. He said he had come to speak out against a controversial compensation deal, agreed in secret and without consulting victims, which did not represent justice for Jo or the 345 others who died.
Last night, Ms Connolly Ryan said she and her lawyers remained undeterred and would be continuing to fight for justice through the courts.