Lawyers for US aviation giant Boeing and the families of victims of a fatal Ethiopian Airlines crash will give opening statements Tuesday in the first civil trial stemming from the disaster.
The legal proceedings began Monday with the selection of an eight-person jury who will hear the case concerning the March 10, 2019 flight that went down six minutes after departing Addis Ababa for Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board.
Family members of 155 victims filed lawsuits between April 2019 and March 2021, alleging wrongful death and negligence, among other claims.
On four prior occasions, attorneys reached last-minute settlements that averted a trial. But this time is different.
Each side will have 90 minutes on Tuesday to present its case. An out-of-court settlement is possible even during the trial, which is intended to establish compensation owed by Boeing to the victims’ relatives.
The hearing is scheduled to begin at 9:30 am in Chicago (1530 GMT).
The two principal plaintiffs in this week’s trial are the families of Shikha Garg of New Delhi and Mercy Ndivo of Kenya.
Garg had been a consultant for the United Nations Development Program who had been traveling to Nairobi for a UN Environment Assembly.
She had gotten married three months earlier and had planned to travel with her husband, who canceled his flight at the last minute because of a professional meeting. Garg had attended the landmark 2015 UN climate talks in Paris.
Ndivo and her husband, who also died in the crash, were parents of a girl who is now almost eight years old. She was returning from London, having attended a graduation ceremony after earning a Masters in Accountancy.
Boeing has said it is “deeply sorry” for the Ethiopian Airlines crash and for a separate MAX crash on Lion Air that killed 189 people on a domestic flight in Indonesia in 2018.
The American manufacturer has also stressed its commitment to settling cases when possible.
The firm has “accepted responsibility for the MAX crashes publicly and in civil litigation because the design of the MCAS… contributed to these events,” a Boeing lawyer said last October.
The MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System) flight stabilizing software was implicated in both the Ethiopian Airlines and Lion Air crashes.
Boeing also faced dozens of complaints from Lion Air family victims. Just one case remains open.
