Friday, March 10 marked four years since the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 MAX crash. On this symbolic date, families of victims gathered in front of the aircraft manufacturer’s headquarters, near Washington, to denounce its “total impunity”.
“There has been no investigation, from a judicial point of view and from a criminal point of view, in the United States, criminally, for manslaughter,” Frenchwoman Catherine Berthet told AFP. who lost her daughter Camille in the accident. Other families have come especially from Canada or Germany to brandish, in the rain, portraits of missing loved ones.
On March 10, 2019, six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa, flight ET302 bound for Nairobi crashed in a field southeast of the Ethiopian capital, killing all 157 passengers and crew. This accident occurred less than five months after that, in similar conditions, of a 737 MAX of the Indonesian company Lion Air, which had killed 189 people.
“It’s Boeing’s best-seller even though it’s dangerous”
The succession of these two tragedies had brought to light a fault in flight control software. After 20 months of grounding, the aircraft was cleared to fly again in the United States. “This plane is still in the air and it is Boeing’s best-seller, this 737 MAX, even though it is dangerous”, believes Catherine Berthet.
The American authorities and Boeing concluded an agreement in early 2021 in which the industrialist admitted that two of its employees had misled the authorities during the certification of the 737 MAX and agreed to pay 2.5 billion dollars in penalties and fines. compensation, in exchange for a cessation of criminal proceedings.
This agreement is contested by Catherine Berthet and other families of victims. A Texas-based federal judge ruled in early February that he lacked the authority to grant their demands, and the case is now on appeal.