Boeing is set to face a jury trial beginning Monday in Chicago over the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash involving a 737 MAX aircraft—marking the first civil lawsuit tied to the tragedy to reach court. The trial, expected to last two weeks, originally involved two plaintiffs who lost relatives in the crash.
However, one of the cases was settled privately late Sunday, a judicial source revealed, continuing a trend of confidential settlements in related lawsuits.
Jury selection is set to open the trial, although attorneys say further out-of-court agreements could occur during the proceedings. “We’ve had ongoing discussions that may continue throughout the day and ensuing days,” said Robert Clifford, who represents several families of crash victims, during a pre-trial hearing on Wednesday.
The Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed on March 10, 2019—just six minutes after takeoff from Addis Ababa en route to Nairobi—killing all 157 people onboard. From April 2019 to March 2021, families of 155 victims filed lawsuits against Boeing, citing wrongful death and negligence. As of late March, 18 of those cases were still active. Sunday’s settlement resolved three more.
This week’s trial will center on the case of 46-year-old Canadian Darcy Belanger, a Colorado-based environmental advocate and founding member of the Parvati Foundation, who was en route to a UN conference in Nairobi.
US District Judge Jorge Alonso has grouped the remaining lawsuits into batches of five or six, ruling that if all claims in a group are settled, the trial will not proceed. A previous trial set for November was canceled under such circumstances after Boeing reached a last-minute deal with another victim’s family.
The 2019 crash occurred months after a similar Lion Air disaster in Indonesia in October 2018, which also involved a 737 MAX and claimed 189 lives. Boeing faced lawsuits from both incidents and, as of March 2025, only one Lion Air-related case remains open.
Although the terms of Boeing’s civil settlements are confidential, the company has publicly accepted responsibility for the crashes. In an October hearing, a Boeing lawyer acknowledged that the aircraft’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) played a role in both tragedies.
The MCAS design flaw triggered global criticism, multiple investigations, and the worldwide grounding of the 737 MAX fleet for over 20 months. Boeing revised the MCAS software, and the aircraft resumed service in November 2020 with approval from the FAA.
Separately, Boeing is facing a potential criminal trial in Texas in June over alleged violations of a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement with the US Justice Department. The renewed scrutiny follows a January 2024 emergency landing involving an Alaska Airlines 737 MAX due to a mid-air panel blowout. A federal judge has ordered a jury trial to begin on June 23 after rejecting a proposed settlement between Boeing and prosecutors.
