Justice at last for Mick Ryan's family as Boeing found liable for 2019 crash
Mick Ryan, an Irish humanitarian worker, was one of the 157 people who died in the Boeing 737 Max crash on March 10, 2019. File picture
A civil jury in Chicago has delivered the latest twist in a long and winding road for the family of the late Mick Ryan, who became inadvertent yet relentless campaigners for global air safety following his death in a plane crash seven years ago.
Micheál (Mick) Ryan, aged 39, was killed along with 156 others in an Ethiopian Airlines flight which crashed in Addis Ababa just six minutes after take-off on March 10, 2019.
The deputy chief engineer at the UN’s World Food Programme was killed alongside several of his work colleagues.
Originally from Clare, the 39-year-old had been living in Cork before relocating to Rome. He had been working in Liberia with Rohingya refugees during the Ebola crisis.
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What made the crash even more unimaginable for the families of those who perished was its similarities to another accident just months earlier, also in a Boeing 737 Max aircraft, long heralded by the aviation industry as the evolution in aircraft excellence.
Six months before the Ethiopian Airlines disaster, a Lion Air plane in Indonesia crashed in October 2018, killing 189 people.
The Ethiopian Airlines crash prompted a worldwide grounding of the 737 Max that lasted more than a year and triggered multiple investigations into Boeing’s safety culture and regulatory oversight.
US federal prosecutors later charged Boeing with misleading regulators about the Max’s flight-control system, though last November, the federal judge in Texas overseeing the long-running criminal case approved a Justice Department request to dismiss it.
The fatal crashes became a defining crisis for Boeing and the 737 Max programme.
Investigators found that a flight-control system repeatedly forced the nose of the then-new planes downward based on faulty readings from a single sensor, and pilots in both crashes were unable to regain control.
Prosecutors reached an agreement with Boeing, requiring the company to invest an additional $1bn in fines, family compensation and safety improvements.
Boeing’s 737 Max was recertified to start flying again in 2021.
CNN Business in 2020 reported that “the plane maker’s repeated safety oversights and mismanagement were not only tragic but also rank among the most expensive corporate mistakes in history”.
However, for families of those who needlessly perished, it has never been about the money.
Since the March 2019 disaster, Mícheál Ryan’s widow Naoise Connolly Ryan has joined the families of the combined 346 people killed in the two crashes in an attempt to hold the makers of the faulty 737 Max 8 to account.
Ms Connolly Ryan and other families have been dignified yet dogged in pursuit of justice for their loved ones.
Following the November dismissal of the criminal case in Texas, Ms Connolly Ryan and Mick’s mother, Christine Ryan, issued a blistering joint statement.
They accused the US department of justice of gaslighting them over the last three and a half years.
They said: “Words cannot express how devastating this plea deal is for our family and for all the victims’ families ... They first told us we were not crime victims and we had no rights. We fought them in court, and we won.
“They now tell us that the 346 lives lost — in two fatal crashes six months apart — are not relevant to this case and, therefore, there is no accountability for their deaths. They call all of this ‘justice’. This is not justice; this is just an extension of the secret sweetheart deal that Boeing got in 2021 under the Trump administration.”
Under that deal, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, Boeing was exempted from criminal charges as long as it fulfilled its commitment to safety.
However, it was found to be in breach of that agreement after a narrowly averted disaster in January 2024 when a door plug on an Alaska Airlines 737 Max blew out mid-air.
Only last week, Boeing was in the news again for the wrong reasons.
The US aviation regulator ordered inspections of the fuselages of Boeing 737 Max planes for possible cracks in a component.
The FAA airworthiness directive affects an estimated 471 aircraft and follows reports of cracks in earlier Boeing models.
The inspections, which will start in September, follow a similar FAA regime for previous Boeing 737 Next Generation models dating back to 2021.
Cracks were found in a component called the bear strap — sheets supporting the fuselage around the exit doors — on the older planes.
In the early hours of Thursday morning Irish time, it emerged that Mr Ryan’s family was awarded €25m (m) in damages by a Chicago jury.
A jury, albeit civil and not criminal, listened and heard and delivered the only form of justice that it could.
Following the decision, Naoise Connolly Ryan said she felt vindicated.
“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,” she said.
It is the latest jury award finding Boeing culpable.
In May this year, a federal jury awarded $49.5m to the family of a 24-year-old global nonprofit worker killed in the 2019 crash who was travelling to her first major assignment.
The verdict, also in Chicago, resolved one of the last remaining wrongful death lawsuits filed in connection with the disaster.
Samya Stumo, who grew up in Sheffield, Massachusetts, had recently joined a nonprofit focused on strengthening health systems in developing countries. A 2015 graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she was travelling to Uganda for what would have been her first major project with the organisation when the plane crashed minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa.
Ms Stumo’s case was the second verdict tied to the crash.
Boeing has reached confidential pre-trial settlements in most of the dozens of wrongful death lawsuits filed in connection with the Ethiopian Airlines disaster and the 737 Max crash five months earlier off the coast of Indonesia.
In November 2025, a jury awarded $28.45m to the family of Shikha Garg, a UN environmental consultant who also died in the 2019 crash. That case marked the first civil jury trial stemming from the disaster, with jurors similarly tasked only with calculating damages because Boeing has accepted liability.
“We are deeply sorry to all who lost loved ones on Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. While we have resolved nearly all of these claims through settlements, families are entitled to pursue their claims through the court process, and we respect their right to do so,” a Boeing spokesperson said in May.
Ms Stumo’s family has been among the most outspoken relatives seeking accountability from Boeing and changes to federal aviation oversight. Her father, Michael Stumo, has publicly pressed Boeing, regulators and Congress over what families viewed as failures that allowed the 737 Max to keep flying after the first crash off the coast of Indonesia.
Micheál Ryan’s wife Naoise has been as vocal in pursuit of the truth over the years.
On the fourth anniversary in 2023, she said the thought of the disaster still haunts her.
“I’m stuck in a never-ending time loop that brings me right back to March 10 time and time again.
“The nightmares of planes falling from the sky, visions of what Mick must have experienced, the absolute terror, how he must have felt, the thoughts that must have gone through his head in those final moments.”
In March this year, around the seventh anniversary, Naoise spoke of the high points — such as having those who died recognised as the victims of crime — but very many more low points, not least the dismissal of the charge of criminal conspiracy against Boeing, even though the trial judge described the company’s wrongdoing as “the deadliest corporate crime in US history”.
The fight continues though, with a rare legal move called a mandamus petition, which will ask the court to reverse the decision.
For now, though, the Chicago civil jury award is an important step in the fight, which will go on.
Her lawyer Steven Marks said: “We have been honoured to stand beside her in her unwavering pursuit to hold Boeing accountable.
“Although the verdict marks a significant milestone, the broader effort to hold Boeing responsible for this tragedy, and to help prevent anything like it from happening again, is just as important.”
And while Naoise Connolly Ryan feels vindicated, the incalculable loss remains.
“We got justice, but we are still walking out of the courtroom without Mick,” she said.
- Further reporting by the Irish Examiner, Associated Press, and The Guardian
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