Lead Attorney Suing Boeing: “They Tossed Safety Aside” to Maximize Profits, Continued to Sell Defective Plane After Lion Air Crash

Nomaan Husain, a Houston-based attorney representing families suing The Boeing Company over the deadly 737 MAX tragedies in Indonesia and Ethiopia, says CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s Senate testimony is “shocking to me.”

Husain, speaking on Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom”, said Muilenburg’s testimony that Boeing is a safe company rings hollow, “If his company was such a safe company, after the Lion Air crash exactly a year ago, they should have grounded the fleet.”

In response to a question from host John Scott about Boeing’s victim’s compensation fund, he noted that the company had quietly cut the fund by half, to just $50 million. “Boeing sold an additional 248 737 MAX planes between the dates of the two crashes,” Husain said. “It’s clear from his testimony that Boeing prioritized profits over safety.”

Husain is suing the aircraft maker on behalf of the families of several victims killed in the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX, near Jakarta, Indonesia on October 29, 2018 and an Ethiopian Airlines crash outside Addis Ababa in March 2019. Both planes went into uncontrolled nose dives shortly after takeoff when a sensor failure caused its Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) flight control system to incorrectly signal a stall. Both crashes claimed 346 lives.

The lawsuit contends Boeing knew about defects in the MCAS but was more concerned about maintaining its market share versus European rival Airbus and actively concealed the issue from federal regulators and its airline partners around the world.