A New Low

Boeing is being sued on behalf of the victims of the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash.

Boeing's defense, at least in part, is that the aircraft hit the ground so hard and so fast that there was no opportunity for them to feel pain. (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.")

I guess that they think that the preceding 6 minutes of terror is just a fun roller-coaster ride.

Even for the corporatized and McDonnelized Boeing, this argument is a new low for what used to be an aircraft manufacturer:

Four years after a second 737 MAX crashed, Boeing Co.and attorneys for families of the dead are arguing over whether the plane maker should have to pay for the victims’ suffering.

Boeing attorneys say the crash victims died instantaneously when the Ethiopian Airlines jet slammed into the ground. They argue in court documents that any pain and suffering they may have felt before impact aren’t legally relevant for calculating damages.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys want the company to pay for what they say was a terrifying six-minute roller coaster before the plane’s high-speed, fatal nosedive.

………

At issue in the 737 MAX case is whether compensation should be available for victims’ suffering under law in Illinois, where Arlington, Va.-based Boeing had its headquarters at the time of the crashes. In a recent court filing, Boeing attorneys cited an expert who said that the 737 MAX victims died painlessly because the airplane crashed into the ground so fast that their brains didn’t have time to process pain signals from their nervous systems.

We really need to start sending executives to jail for things like the decisions that led to this crash.

Without accountability, we will only see more of this.