Culpability in the Ethiopian crash

WINSTED — A large audience filled the theater at The American Museum of Tort Law here on Saturday, June 22, for a program called “Samya Stumo, the Ethiopian Air Crash and the Boeing 737 Max” with Ralph Nader, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, and Nadia Milleron and Michael Stumo of Sheffield, whose daughter Samya Stumo (who is also Nader’s grandniece), died on March 10, 2019 in the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302. Their messages were hard-hitting and fell into two categories: the lives of Samya, her fellow passengers and their families, and the alleged culpability of Boeing and the FAA in the devastating plane crash that killed all 157 passengers and crew.

Since the 1950’s, Ralph Nader has been a leading advocate for consumer protection and public safety. He fought for  mandatory auto seat belts and airbags, and his activism led to the passage of the Consumer Product Safety Act.  In tragic irony, a crash that is seen by Nader and others as a disastrous failure of airline safety standards and a gross lack of governmental oversight, has brought unfathomable grief to the close knit Nader family with the loss of 24-year-old Samya. She was traveling from Addis Ababa to Nairobi, about to begin her first overseas assignment as a global public health analyst. She was described by her employer at the non-profit ThinkWell as  “a rising star, contagiously enthusiastic about her work and about life in general.”

Samya grew up on her family’s farm in Sheffield and she worshipped at the All Saints Orthodox Christian Church in Salisbury where as a child she developed a love for people and a desire to “do right by all human beings.” In that spirit,  Samya’s mother Nadia Milleron told stories of connecting with the families of other ET-302 passengers and gathering their photographs to add to the poster montage that she and her husband carry to the offices of legislators in their advocacy to tighten airline regulations and “bring accountability back to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).” The Stumos have filed a wrongful death suit against Boeing for negligence, failure to warn, and civil conspiracy for “putting profits over safety.” They have also filed a claim against the FAA, who Ms. Milleron said “did not protect our loved ones” and instead outsourced their duties as safety regulators.

Sen. Blumenthal stated that he has proposed federal legislation to “return full regulatory authority to the FAA” which he reports is understaffed and has delegated their own inspection and certification responsibilities to outside sources including manufacturers including Boeing.

Nader goes a step beyond demanding legislation. He proposes that Boeing “Axe the Max” and permanently ground all 737 Max 8 aircraft, explaining that the craft is a reworking of “decades-old technology that Boeing hastily put into service in an effort to compete with rival Airbus,” a move that he claims was a “a premeditated attempt at cutting corners for material profit and short term gains.” Boeing modified the existing 737 by adding larger engines which Nader said “changed the aircraft’s center of gravity creating a stall-prone engine that is unstable.” Instead of scrapping the entire design, Boeing devised a software system (MCAS) which failed to stabilize the aircraft in the crash of both ET-302 and a LionAir flight months earlier. Nader stated that fixing the MCAS software will not solve the problem because the overall design of the Boeing 737 Max 8 is deeply flawed, and he urges that the plane be taken out of service. “Can we do anything less?” he asked. “The crashes were preventable and must not be allowed to repeat.”

Then Nader spoke quietly and lovingly of his grandniece, her love of life, her intellectual rigor and her blossoming public health career. He said that Samya “had leadership written all over her, and everybody loved her.” He added, “We’ll never know how many lives she would have saved. But there would have been many.”