Nearly seven years after Flight 302 fell from the sky six minutes into its journey, 32 Kenyan families The post Boeing to pay Kenyan families KSh11.3B over Ethiopian Airlines crash appeared first on The Mt Kenya Times .
Nearly seven years after Flight 302 fell from the sky six minutes into its journey, 32 Kenyan families are finally approaching the end of a long and painful legal road.
By Grace Wanja
Families of 32 Kenyans killed in the March 2019 Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash are set to receive a combined $87.3M — approximately KSh11.3B — from Boeing-linked victim compensation funds, Chicago-based law firm Ribbeck Law Chartered confirmed yesterday.
The allocation, totalling $87,343,352.60 and averaging roughly $2.73M per victim, follows the conclusion of legal proceedings in the United States. “We have now concluded the legal work on behalf of our clients in the United States, Africa, the Middle East and Asia,” said Manuel von Ribbeck of the representing firm.
The payments draw from two separate compensation mechanisms established under Boeing’s agreements with the US Department of Justice over the two fatal Boeing 737 MAX disasters. A 2021 deferred prosecution agreement created an initial $500M victim fund. A subsequent 2025 non-prosecution agreement — reached after Boeing faced renewed legal jeopardy — required the manufacturer to provide an additional $444.5M, to be divided equally among estates of the 346 people killed across both crashes. Boeing additionally committed to spending $455M on compliance, safety and quality improvement programmes, alongside appointing an independent consultant to assess progress.
Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, on March 10, 2019, approximately six minutes after departing Addis Ababa bound for Nairobi. All 157 passengers and crew members aboard, representing more than 30 nationalities, perished — among them 32 Kenyans, 18 Canadians, nine Ethiopians, eight Italians, eight Chinese nationals and eight Americans. Five months earlier, Lion Air Flight 610 had crashed into the Java Sea on October 29, 2018, shortly after departing Jakarta, killing all 189 people aboard.
Investigations into both disasters concluded that Boeing’s Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System — MCAS — played a decisive causal role in both accidents. The MCAS software, designed to prevent the aircraft from stalling, repeatedly pushed the nose of both planes downward against pilot inputs, overpowering the crews before either flight crew could regain control. The findings triggered the worldwide grounding of the entire 737 MAX fleet and exposed fundamental failures in aircraft design, pilot training, regulatory oversight and the certification systems governing new commercial aircraft.
For the Kenyan families, the settlement represents not just financial restitution but the formal conclusion of a legal battle that has stretched across nearly seven years of grief, litigation and institutional accountability. Many lost breadwinners, parents and children in a disaster that unfolded in six minutes and was later shown to have been preventable had Boeing acted on known safety concerns before either aircraft entered commercial service.
Boeing’s liability extends well beyond the compensation funds. The company’s reputational and commercial damage from the 737 MAX crisis has been extensive and ongoing, with production delays, regulatory scrutiny and leadership changes reshaping the manufacturer’s trajectory throughout the years since the crashes.
For 32 Kenyan families, however, the calculation has always been simpler and far more personal — and it ends not with a corporate press release, but with a payment that no amount of money can truly make whole.
The post Boeing to pay Kenyan families KSh11.3B over Ethiopian Airlines crash appeared first on The Mt Kenya Times.
