A Kenyan man, Paul Njoroge, who lost his wife, three children and mother-in-law in the Ethiopian Airlines' Boeing 737 crash in 2019, has finally been compensated by the aviation giant.
The compensation agreement was drawn up on Friday, meaning that Boeing will avoid a federal trial that had been slated for Monday, July 16.
However, the settlement has not been revealed publicly, although his lawyers confirmed to AFP that the settlement had been reached for a confidential amount.
"The case has settled for a confidential amount," a spokesperson for Njoroge's legal team stated.
"The aviation team at Clifford Law Offices has been working around the clock in preparation for trial, but the mediator was able to help the parties come to an agreement on behalf of Paul Njoroge."
Njoroge's family succumbed when the Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 they were travelling in on March 10, 2019, crashed just six minutes after departing Addis Ababa for Nairobi.
They were among the 32 Kenyans who perished in the crash that left 157 people dead.
Speaking during a congressional hearing in 2019, Njoroge speculated on the last moments of his family's lives, wondering how terrified his children had been, probably clinging onto their mother in the last moments.
"It is difficult for me to think of anything else but the horror they must have felt. I cannot get it out of my mind."
This is just the latest settlement that Boeing has reached with the surviving families of all the casualties, avoiding federal trials in most of them.
Since the crash up to 2021, the families had bundled together to sue Boeing for wrongful death and negligence.
The aviation company has since accepted responsibility for the Ethiopian Airlines crash, blaming the design of the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), a flight handling system that malfunctioned.
The same system was also blamed for a similar crash, the Lion Air crash in 2018, when the 737 MAX 8 fell into the sea after taking off from Jakarta, Indonesia, killing all 189 people on board.
