The family of a Lahinch humanitarian worker who was killed in a plane crash in Ethiopia seven years ago has been awarded 29 million dollars in damages.
Naoise Connolly Ryan took the civil case against Boeing following the death of her husband, Micheál ‘Mick’ Ryan, in March 2019.
Shortly after 8.30am on March 10th, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 departed from Addis Ababa for Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, with 149 passengers and eight crew on board.
Just minutes after take-off, the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft crashed, killing all 157 people on board.
The crash was the second involving a 737 MAX in the space of six months, following the Lion Air disaster in Indonesia in October 2018, which killed 189 people.
Boeing later acknowledged in a Chicago Federal Court that the 737 MAX aircraft possessed “unsafe conditions” and that its MCAS anti-stall software was implicated in the Ethiopian airlines crash.
The company agreed to pay a fine of €224m and to spend over €400m on improving internal safety and compliance programmes for making false presentations about key software.
Following a lengthy campaign for justice, Micheál’s widow Naoise Connolly Ryan was awarded 29 million dollars by a Chicago jury in a civil case, according to a US court spokesperson.
The award is worth around 25 million euro.
Micheál ‘Mick’ Ryan, was a Chief Engineer with the World Food Programme, helping to bring assistance to vulnerable people in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Ethiopia, and more recently, in Bangladesh.
He also played a key role in tackling the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Liberia, where he helped build several medical centres.
