Proactive Investors - The Boeing Company (NYSE:BA) could face a new wave of lawsuits following an Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX jet crash which killed 157 people in 2019, a judge ruled on Tuesday.
Families of crash victims will be able to seek compensation for the pain and suffering of their loved ones in the moments leading to the crash, U.S. district judge Jorge Alonso determined.
"There is sufficient evidence to support a reasonable inference that these passengers experienced pre-impact fright and terror,” Alonso wrote.
Passengers "perceived that they were going to crash” before the impact, he added, rejecting Boeing’s motion that there was no evidence to prove this.
Boeing agreed to compensate victims’ families in 2021 but argued against evidence in February that passengers had experienced pain and suffering prior to the crash.
Around 80 victims’ cases had been settled by early May, leaving 75 still pending, with trials set to begin on June 20.
An earlier crash in October 2018 in Indonesia by a Lion Air-operated Boeing 737 MAX claimed the lives of a further 189 people, with the two events leading to the grounding of the jets until December 2020.
Boeing has already paid US$2.5bn in fines and compensation over the crashes after being found to have disclosed a production problem with fittings in the aircraft’s fuselage.
Boeing shares fell 2% to US$201.80.