Boeing faces fresh lawsuits from families of Ethiopian airlines crash victims

Chicago: Fresh lawsuits were filed against Boeing at the federal district court here by two families of passengers who lost their lives in the recent Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX crash that left all the 157 people on board dead.

The two plaintiffs - Manant Vaidya and Paul Njoroge - lost several close family members in the March 10 crash, which spurred the grounding of Boeing MAX jets by a number of countries, including India.

Three generations of Canada-based Vaidya's family, which had Indian origin, were killed. Those dead included the man's father Pannagesh Bhaskar Vaidya, mother Hansini Pannagesh Vaidya, sister Kosha Pannagesh Vaidya, brother-in-law Preritkumar Dixit and two nieces, 14-year-old Ashka Dixit and 13-year-old Anushka Dixit.

"I lost three generations of my family, my parents, my sister, my nieces. If a person lost just one life, their whole life is shattered. But right now with me, I'm more like, I don't know. I'm completely lost right now," Vaidya, accompanied by his wife Hiral, said during a news conference at the Clifford Law Offices here on Monday.

The other plaintiff, Njoroge, lost his wife Carolyne Nduta Karanja, mother-in-law Ann Karanja, and three children -- six-year-old son Ryan Njoroge Njuguna and daughters Kellie W. Pauls, four years, and Rubi W. Pauls, nine months, in the deadly crash, according to Xinhua.

"I stay up all night crying, thinking of the horror that they must have endured as pilots struggled to keep the plane flying for six minutes...The terror that my wife must have experienced with little Rubi on her lap...Our two children beside her, crying for their daddy, my mom-in-law, feeling helplessness...Those six minutes will forever be embedded in my mind. I was not there to help them. I couldn't save them," Njoroge said, choking several times while reading out his statement.

Boeing has been working on safer technology updates after coming under fire following two crashes - the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the Lion Air crash - which took place within five months of each other and claimed the lives of 346 people. The aircraft manufacturer's shares plummeted to its worst-ever low following the March crash, seeing an approximate 5 per cent drop in its stock price since the incident.

"We at Boeing are sorry for the lives lost in the recent 737 MAX accidents...All of us feel the immense gravity of these events across our company and recognize the devastation of the families and friends of the loved ones who perished," Boeing President and CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a statement earlier.

"We've had teams of our top engineers and technical experts working tirelessly in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration and our customers to finalize and implement a software update that will ensure accidents like that of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 never happen again," it read.

The fresh lawsuits join a string of others which were filed against the American company in the aftermath of the crashes.