Boeing braces for massive lawsuits

Empty coffins representing the Ethiopian victims of last week's Ethiopia Airlines plane crash have been buried in Addis Ababa and Legalbrief reports that many questions remain unanswered. None of the bodies has yet been formally identified because of the impact when the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft crashed shortly after it took off for Nairobi, killing all 157 people on board. Ahead of the memorial service, the airline offered the relatives bags of scorched earth to bury in place of their loved ones. BBC News reports that Transport Minister Dagmawit Moges on Saturday said it may take ‘considerable time’ for investigators to find the cause of the crash involving the new aircraft. Relatives of the passengers killed in the incident are being encouraged to provide DNA samples either in Addis Ababa or at any overseas offices of Ethiopian Airlines. Flight data from the disaster suggest ‘clear similarities’ with a crash off Indonesia last October, Moges said.

Full BBC News report

The sovereignty, integrity and role of civil aviation regulators have become the focus of debate in aviation circles since the tragedy. The SA Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA), like the US Federal Aviation Administration, did not order the grounding of this aircraft model as a precaution immediately after the Ethiopian Airlines crash. It was only days later that US President Donald Trump announced the grounding of all Boeing 737 MAX 8s. This step, supported by the manufacturer Boeing, effectively grounded all 371 of these planes in operation around the world. In SA, however, there is still not an official airworthiness directive on the SACAA website to make it mandatory to ground all MAX 8s. A report on the Fin24 site notes that SACAA spokesperson Kabelo Ledwaba said in the authority's view it was not necessary to issue one in SA as only Comair had a MAX 8 that was flying in and out of SA in service, and this aircraft had been voluntarily grounded.

Full Fin24 report

Meanwhile, Boeing’s insurers face big claims from families of the victims, insurance and aviation sources said. While the initial insurance payments will be made by Ethiopian Airlines’ insurers, they may look to recoup their money from Boeing’s insurers if they can prove that the aircraft was faulty, the sources said. A report on The East African site notes that initial payments to the passengers’ families are bound by the Warsaw and Montreal conventions, but those pay-outs could be much higher if families pursue legal claims, particularly through US courts. ‘If there were to be anything defective in terms of the plane or any of its components, then it would be possible to bring a claim against the manufacturer as well as the airline,’ said Clive Garner, head of law firm Irwin Mitchell’s travel litigation group in London. It is not uncommon for the plane manufacturer, which is headquartered in Chicago, to face lawsuits in the US, where legal compensation payments for the crash victims could reach $2m to $3m per victim, depending on the law applied, compared to about $200 000 in Ethiopia.

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Full report on The East African site