Ethiopia Air crash victim families seek more than money

Bloomberg

One year after losing his wife in the Boeing Co 737 Max crash in Ethiopia, it’s the lack of information about what happened that is prolonging Bayihe Demissie’s grief.
More than 500 family members of victims of the disaster will gather at the crash site outside the capital, Addis Ababa, to commemorate the first anniversary of the tragedy. As a families’ representative, Bayihe, 35, will seek to console many who are still waiting for answers about what brought down the Ethiopian Airlines Group flight moments after takeoff, killing all 157 people on board.
“It is not the money that heals you,” Bayihe, a father of a two-year-old boy said in an interview, while sobbing intermittently. “What the families want is clear information.”

Few Answers
Boeing provided $100 million to help the families and communities of those affected by the Ethiopian crash and an earlier disaster — a Lion Air flight operating a 737 Max jet carrying 189 passengers and crew that plunged into the Java Sea in 2018. In both cases, the safety of the plane came under scrutiny and led to the grounding of the entire fleet.
To date, relatives of more than 300 of the crash victims have received payouts of $144,500 per family, according to Kenneth Feinberg, the US lawyer hired by Boeing to handle the distributions.
For answers about why the plane went down, the families may wait a while longer.
Ethiopian authorities plan to release an interim report that excludes information from “a lot” of investigations that are continuing, Amdye Ayalew, the nation’s chief crash investigator, said.
That means the statement will likely lack comprehensive findings about the roles played by Boeing, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or Ethiopian Airlines in the disaster. Investigators have tentatively concluded that the plane’s design caused the crash, Bloomberg reported.
Boeing is working to return the 737 Max to service as soon as mid-year, and try to resuscitate what was once the company’s best-selling jet. The FAA’s reputation is at stake as the main certifying body for the 737 Max. After the Indonesian crash was followed less than five months later by the one in Ethiopia, airline safety agencies from Europe to Asia broke ranks with the FAA and grounded the plane rather than wait for the US to act.
Boeing declined to comment on the Ethiopia report when contacted.
The matter is as sensitive in Ethiopia, where the government has built its airline into Africa’s most-consistently profitable carrier and now aspires to develop a larger aviation hub.