Boeing crash payouts linked to victims’ final minutes

Lawyers suing over Max crashes say compensation will be higher for those who knew their fate longer

SETTLEMENTS to the families of 346 people who died in the two catastrophic Boeing Max plane crashes will be calculated, in part, by how long the victims knew they were doomed.

Lawyers handling claims against the US aerospace company said the longer the passengers and crew were aware of their fate and suffered mental anguish, the larger the likely payout.

“There’s a better chance of [financial] recovery if it took minutes rather than seconds for the plane to crash,’’ Joe Power, a personal-injury lawyer representing some Ethiopian victims, told Bloomberg this weekend.

The first passenger plane, Lion Air Flight 610, ditched into the Java Sea 12 minutes after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia on Oct 29 last year.

Six months later, on March 10, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed six minutes after take off from Addis Ababa.

In both cases, the jets were 737 Max 8 models and all aboard died.

Experts say the Boeing Company could be facing payouts in excess of $1 billion (£770 million) if it can be proved that it had knowledge that the model had safety flaws. Thirty individual lawsuits have now been filed against Boeing on behalf of families, with many more expected.

“The bottom line is Boeing’s exposure is much more substantial than in any other case that I’ve been a part of in my quarter-century of representing families in plane-crash cases,” said Brian Alexander, a New York aviation lawyer for victims of the Ethiopian Airlines jet.

“You get into ‘What did you know and when did you know it?’” The two disasters, with similar characteristics, led to the worldwide grounding of all Boeing 737 Max 8 models.

Both pilots desperately struggled to take control of the aeroplanes as they intermittently dived while reaching speeds of close to 600 miles per hour.

Investigators have focused on the malfunctioning MCAS (manoeuvring characteristics augmentation system), an automated safety feature designed to prevent a stall. Earlier this month, Dennis Muilenburg, the Boeing CEO, acknowledged its automatic flight control system had played a role in the two crashes.

“The full details of what happened in the two accidents will be issued by the government authorities in the final reports, but, with the release of the preliminary report of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 accident investigation, it’s apparent that in both flights the MCAS activated in response to erroneous angle of attack information.”