Boeing evades MAX crash trial with last-minute settlement

A Boeing 737 Max aircraft during a display at the Farnborough International Airshow, in Farnborough, Britain, July 20, 2022.[FILE

]

Boeing has reached a settlement with a man whose family died in a 737 MAX crash in 2019, a law firm told AFP on Friday, meaning the US aviation giant will avoid a federal trial slated for Monday.

Paul Njoroge, who lost his wife and three children in the Ethiopian Airlines disaster in which 157 people died, was to seek damages from Boeing in a case in Chicago.

"The case has settled for a confidential amount," said a spokesperson for Clifford Law, the firm representing Njoroge, whose mother-in-law also died in the crash.

"The aviation team at Clifford Law Offices has been working round-the-clock in preparation for trial, but the mediator was able to help the parties come to an agreement on behalf of Paul Njoroge," added Robert Clifford, a senior partner at Clifford, in a statement.

Until now, Boeing has succeeded in avoiding civil trials connected to the 737 MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019, reaching a series of settlements, sometimes only hours before trials were set to begin.

The crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 on March 10, 2019 took place six minutes after departing Addis Ababa for Nairobi.

Njoroge lost his wife Carolyne, who was 33, his mother-in-law Ann Karanja, and the couple's three children: six-year-old Ryan; Kelli, who was four; and nine-month-old Rubi.

Njoroge told a congressional panel in July 2019 he was haunted by ideas of the final moments of the flight, how his children "must have clung to their mother, crying, seeing the fright in her eyes."

"It is difficult for me to think of anything else but the horror they must have felt," he said. "I cannot get it out of my mind."

The trial set for Monday was expected to last five to seven days.

Between April 2019 and March 2021, family members of 155 Boeing victims joined litigation charging the aviation giant with wrongful death and negligence.

Boeing has accepted responsibility for the Ethiopian Airlines crash, blaming the design of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a flight handling system that malfunctioned.

That system was also implicated in the Lion Air crash in 2018, when the 737 MAX 8 fell into the sea after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board.

The Lion Air crash also spawned dozens of lawsuits in the United States. But as of July 2025, only one case remained open.

Boeing has said it has reached out-of-court agreements with more than 90 percent of civil complainants in the MAX cases.

The company also has a settlement pending that would resolve a long-running Department of Justice criminal probe connected to the MAX crashes.

Some MAX families are contesting the Department of Justice's accord with Boeing, arguing that the company should face federal prosecution. US District Judge Reed O'Connor, in Texas, has yet to make a final decision on the proposed accord.