Naoise Ryan feels 'vindicated' following Boeing payout over husband's death

“I don’t want this story to be about an amount of money. I would never have taken this civil case if we had achieved justice through the criminal court system, but now Boeing has said they are 100% responsible for the crash. It is on the record at last.”

Those were the words of Cork woman Naoise Connolly Ryan, widow of UN engineer Mick Ryan killed in a 2019 Boeing 737 Max crash. She has said she feels vindicated after a Chicago jury awarded her family $29m (€25 million) damages in a civil case.

For the first time in a public courtroom, she heard Boeing admit 100% responsibility for the Ethiopian Airlines crash that claimed the life of her husband and 156 others just six minutes after take-off in Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019.

Over the last seven years, Ms Connolly Ryan and family members of the other victims have fought to hold the aircraft-manufacturing giant to account.

They took a series of cases through the criminal courts without success but, on Wednesday, the jury in a civil case taken by Naoise Connolly Ryan awarded damages in a verdict she described as a victory for all victims.

Speaking from Chicago, Ms Connolly Ryan said she felt that there had been some measure of justice, transparency and accountability at last.

While the company admitted that a fault in its flight-stabilising system (Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System) led to the 2019 crash, and the 2018 Jakarta crash a few months before which claimed 190 lives, it withdrew its guilty plea in the first criminal hearing in Texas in January 2023.

At the time, the court judge said Boeing had committed “one of the deadliest corporate crimes in the history of the United States” yet the criminal court system did not hold it to account.

Naoise Connolly Ryan is still bewildered that there can be such a gap between two legal systems – the criminal versus the civil court – but is happy that Boeing’s admission is now on the record.

While the details of her husband’s death alone were permitted in court, she said her victory was a victory for all of those killed in two deadly crashes.

She paid tribute, too, to Mick Ryan’s former colleagues who travelled from as far away as Turkey to give evidence, and to her lawyers who did all they could to bring “Mick back to life in the court”.

It was important to her that Mick, a father of two and an award-winning humanitarian, would be remembered as a person who did life-saving work in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal, to mention a few of his UN posts.

Boeing were contacted for comment.