Alwaght- Rwandan kids have filed a lawsuit against US plane-maker Boeing over the recent crash of the company’s 737 Max airplane operated by Ethiopian Airlines.
The lawsuit against Boeing Co was filed in US federal court on Thursday in what appeared to be the first suit over a March 10 Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash that killed 157 people.
The lawsuit was filed in Chicago federal court by the family of Jackson Musoni, a citizen of Rwanda, and alleges that Boeing, which manufactures the 737 MAX, had defectively designed the automated flight control system.
Wednesday’s complaint was filed by Musoni’s three minor children, who are Dutch citizens residing in Belgium. Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
The 737 MAX planes were grounded worldwide following the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, which came five months after a Lion Air crash in Indonesia that killed 189 people.
The crash of Boeing’s passenger jet in Ethiopia raised the chances that families of the victims, even non-U.S. residents, will be able to sue in US courts, where payouts are much larger than in other countries, some legal experts have said.
The lawsuit says Boeing failed to warn the public, airlines and pilots of the airplane’s allegedly erroneous sensors, causing the aircraft to dive automatically and uncontrollably.
Ethiopian officials and some analysts have said the Ethiopian Airlines jet behaved in a similar pattern as the 737 MAX involved in October’s Lion Air disaster. Investigators probing the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 Max in Ethiopia have reached a preliminary conclusion that a suspect anti-stall system activated shortly before it nose-dived to the ground.
The findings were based on flight recorder data and represented the strongest indication yet that the system, known as MCAS, malfunctioned in both the Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 and the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last year
The crisis for the US aviation company is growing as the European Union and Canada said they would seek their own guarantees over the safety of the 737 MAX.
