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More families of victims file lawsuits against Boeing

As many as 25 families of Lion Air flight crash victims have officially filed a lawsuit against United States aerospace company Boeing, a legal representative said on Wednesday

Dyaning Pangestika (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, December 15, 2018

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More families of victims file lawsuits against Boeing

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s many as 25 families of Lion Air flight crash victims have officially filed a lawsuit against United States aerospace company Boeing, a legal representative said on Wednesday.

An attorney from Ribbeck Law Chartered, Manuel Von Ribbeck, stated that his firm would be representing the families to demand compensation worth up to US$100 million from Boeing, from which they would receive $4 million each.

According to Ribbeck, the lawsuit against Boeing was initiated in November by the family of Rio Nanda Pratama, one of the victims of the air crash.

However, Manuel said his firm would include new lawsuits from 24 other families in the first hearing at the Circuit Court of Cook County in Illinois, US, on Jan. 17, 2019.

“We will represent these 25 families to get the compensation they deserve. Although we cannot guarantee that we will receive it, we will try our best to represent them in court,” Manuel said during a press conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Wednesday.

Aside from demanding compensation from Boeing, the lawsuit also seeks to reveal the cause of the air crash.

Lion Air flight 610 crashed into the Java Sea on Oct. 29, killing all 189 people abroad.

The plane, which was the popular Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, plummeted into the sea minutes after takeoff from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Banten, nosediving so suddenly that it may have hit speeds of 965.6 kilometers an hour before slamming into the water.

Earlier, American law firms Colson Hicks Eidson and Bartlett Chen said they were representing the parents of Rio Nanda Pratama, who was among the 189 people on board the flight.

The lawsuit against Boeing, which was filed in November in a state court in Chicago, also centered on an error in the new aircraft system.

The law firms blamed the new automated flight-control system on the Boeing 737 MAX 8 as the cause of the fatal crash because it was not included in prior versions of the 737.

They highlighted the company’s failure to warn its customers and pilots about this significant change in the new 737, while it also failed to include appropriate instructions in its manuals.

“The flight-control system is intended to help the flight crew avoid raising a plane’s nose too high, but under certain conditions it can push the nose down unexpectedly and so strongly that the pilot cannot pull it back up in time to avoid a crash.

“This automated feature can be triggered even if pilots are manually flying the aircraft and don’t expect flight-control computers to kick in,” the law firms said.

Boeing has pushed back on suggestions that it could have better alerted airlines about the new anti-stall feature in the 737 MAX jetliner. “You may have seen media reports that we intentionally withheld information about airplane functionality from our customers. That’s simply untrue,” Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg wrote in a message to employees, as quoted by Bloomberg. “The relevant function is described in the Flight Crew Operations Manual and we routinely engage with our customers about how to operate our airplanes safely.”

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