Boeing Ordered to Pay $49.5 Million to Family of American Killed in 2019 Ethiopian Airlines Crash

A federal jury on Wednesday ordered Boeing to pay $49.5 million over the death of an American on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, resolving one of the last lawsuits from a pair of fatal crashes that killed 346 people.

The Chicago jury awarded the family of 24-year-old Samya Stumo $16.5 million for their loss of companionship, $12 million for their grief, and $21 million for her experience on the plane. Because Boeing had already acknowledged responsibility for the crash, the trial focused solely on the scale of compensatory relief rather than on liability.

Stumo was an American aid worker from Massachusetts who died when the Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet crashed six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in Ethiopia en route to Kenya.

“We are gratified for the opportunity to try the compensatory damages case,” said attorneys Shanin Specter and Elizabeth Crawford of the Philadelphia-based firm Kline & Specter, who represent Stumo’s estate.

In May 2025, the Department of Justice said it had reached a deal to drop its criminal prosecution of Boeing over two 737 MAX crashes that occurred within five months of each other: one off the coast of Indonesia in October 2018, and another in Ethiopia in March 2019, which killed all 346 people on board both flights.

Investigators linked the crashes to a flight control system called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which was designed to automatically push the plane’s nose down if a sensor detected a stall. In both tragedies, erroneous sensor readings activated MCAS, sending the aircraft into a dive that the pilots were unable to reverse.

According to a 2019 report by the Joint Authorities Technical Review, a panel of experts from the FAA and other international aviation regulators, Boeing removed information relating to MCAS functionality from a draft of the 737 MAX flight manual. As a result, FAA officials responsible for certifying aircraft designs were “not fully aware of the MCAS function” and were “not in a position to adequately assess” the level of pilot training required to meet safety needs.

Federal prosecutors later stated that because of this omission, aircraft manuals and pilot training materials used by U.S.-based airlines “lacked information about MCAS.”

Under the May 2025 agreement, Boeing agreed to admit to “conspiracy to obstruct and impede” the FAA, instead of standing trial on a felony charge of conspiracy to defraud federal regulators. Boeing also committed to paying $444.5 million into a crash victims’ compensation fund, a $243.6 million criminal fine, and $455 million toward safety and compliance enhancements. In March, a U.S. appeals court upheld the ruling that approved the Justice Department’s decision to dismiss the fraud charge.

Wednesday’s ruling is the second civil jury verdict tied to the Ethiopian Airlines tragedy. In November 2025, a jury ordered Boeing to pay more than $28 million to the family of Shikha Garg, a United Nations environmental official who also died aboard Flight 302 out of Ethiopia. Boeing settled the vast majority of civil lawsuits arising from both crashes before any reached a jury, making the Stumo and Garg trials among the rare cases to go to trial.

The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide for 20 months after the second crash. Stumo’s mother, Nadia Milleron, spoke of her daughter’s trust in commercial aviation before boarding.

Bill Pan and Reuters contributed to this report.