‘I want justice for my husband and the other 345 people Boeing killed’
Mick Ryan was talking to his colleague Sogol Akef, a senior engineer with the World Food Programme in Afghanistan, as he rushed to make an Ethiopian Airlines flight on March 10, 2019. They were chatting and laughing as he ran through the terminal in Addis Ababa when he dropped his iPad and broke the screen.
“He said, just like a brother would, ‘Look what you made me do… I’m going to miss my flight…’ I wish every single day he had,” Sogol recalls.
He boarded a Boeing 737 Max. Six minutes after take-off, Flight ET302 crashed, killing all 157 people on board. Mick Ryan, then deputy chief engineer at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) wasn’t even supposed to be on that flight. He had offered to travel to Nairobi to work with engineering and management teams there. He was good at that.
He saw engineering as a way to overcome divisions, and he used his technical skill to design solutions. From 2012 to 2014, for instance, he brought donors, local authorities, and clans people together to get funding — and agreement — to build a bridge in one of the most remote areas of Ethiopia.
He knew it would save time when delivering food to a very isolated population, his colleague Stephen Cahill, WFP director of logistics, says.
Mick Ryan, a native of Co Clare, didn’t forget where he had come from either. “He always kept those colloquial expressions that made him quite unique in Ethiopia. He used the word ‘ye’ whenever he spoke or presented. I always remember the expressions on the faces of Ethiopian colleagues as they desperately tried to understand who exactly ‘ye’ was!” says Cahill.
In 2018, when 690,000 Rohingya people fled Myanmar into Bangladesh, Mick saw how engineering — in this case roads, culverts, bridges, and other engineering works to prevent landslides ahead of monsoon season — lay at the centre of the solution.
“Mick navigated his way through an array of impediments, pulling together three UN agencies [which is no mean feat], drawing up a plan to ensure the camps were safe,” says Cahill.
Ahead of the fifth anniversary of his death tomorrow, his wife Naoise Connolly Ryan is revisiting some of the things that his colleagues wrote about him before he was posthumously named Humanitarian of the Year by the Irish Red Cross in 2020.
It’s important that he is remembered as a person, not just a number, she says.
Numbers are important too, though. Just five months before Mick Ryan was killed in what was later described as a preventable tragedy, 189 people died on Lion Air flight 610 in Indonesia. The plane was just three months old.
After the second fatal crash, all Boeing Max planes were grounded for 20 months. But the second crash would never have happened if the first had been properly investigated, and if all the Max planes had been grounded then, families of the victims say.
A US congressional investigation later found that the crashes were “the horrific culmination of a series of faulty technical assumptions by Boeing’s engineers, a lack of transparency on the part of Boeing’s management, and grossly insufficient oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration”.
We’re back to engineering again and what happens when it goes wrong.
In 2020, the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in the US released the findings of a 200-plus page report that made damning reading. It highlighted “the serious flaws and missteps in the design, development, and certification of the [Max].” It also found a culture of concealment at Boeing and said that production pressures had put the safety of the flying public at risk.
On the technical side, investigators said the crash was due to failures of a piece of software known as the MCAS (Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System), which gave repeated automated commands to put the airplane’s nose down in an action that could not be overridden by the pilots.
Ethiopian Airlines issued a final accident investigation report in December 2022 to say that was not the only issue and “production quality defects” were also a factor in the crash. In 2023 an inquest in Horsham, West Sussex, accepted the findings of this report and found that three British passengers had been unlawfully killed.
The story generated headlines for a time, but it did little to secure justice for the families of the 346 victims of both crashes. They wanted — and still want — those at Boeing who are responsible for the flaws, missteps, and the concealment of information to be held accountable and tried for manslaughter.
In February of last year, US judge Reed O’Connor said Boeing’s failure to prevent both crashes “may properly be considered the deadliest corporate crime in US history”.
Words don’t come much stronger than that. And yet, he told a court in Texas that he did not have the legal means to challenge an agreed deal which gave the company immunity from prosecution.
That deal, known as a deferred prosecution agreement, expired this January, just days after another accident brought concerns about safety back to international attention.
On 5 January, passengers on Alaska Airlines flight 1282 heard a loud bang. Part of the plane’s fuselage (a door plug) had shot out, leaving a massive hole in the side of the aircraft. The force of the air gushing into the plane whipped mobile phones out of people’s hands and, in some cases, the clothes off their backs.
The pilots, however, were able to make an emergency landing and nobody was injured. Again, a Boeing Max model was grounded, this time the Max 9. And again, the families of victims raised the issue of Boeing’s safety record, saying that the latest incident was the story of a disaster foretold.
A few weeks later, CEO of Alaska Airlines Ben Minicucci said it had done safety tests on the model and found “some loose bolts on many” Max 9s. “I’m more than frustrated and disappointed. I am angry. This happened to Alaska Airlines. It happened to our guests and happened to our people. Boeing is better than this.”
Naoise Connolly Ryan wouldn’t agree that Boeing is better than that. She has seen too much over the last five years to believe that the company is doing enough to guarantee the safety of its aircraft.
And, she says, the US has done nothing at all to deliver justice to the 346 victims of the two fatal Boeing crashes.
After the Alaska Airlines accident, Boeing made some changes at management level and replaced the head of its 737 Max passenger jet programme.
But on Wednesday, it emerged that the aircraft manufacturer wasn’t helping those investigating the blow-out. The National Transportation Safety Board said Boeing had not provided certain documents or the names of employees who might have information about the door plug.
“It’s absurd that two months later, we don’t have that,” the safety board’s chair, Jennifer Homendy, told the US Senate Commerce Committee.
After the hearing, Boeing issued a statement to say that it had now provided the full list of names. However, is also implied that there was no documentation at all.
Ten days before, US regulator the Federal Aviation Administration was highly critical of the global plane-maker in a report highlighting a number of shortcomings in Boeing’s safety culture.
There were multiple ‘soft spots’ when it came to safety, according to the 50-page report which was written by independent aviation experts. It found that employees were often afraid to report any issues as there might be consequences, such as a change to their salary.
The most alarming finding, according to one member of the expert panel, Javier de Luis, who lost his sister Graziella in the Ethiopian crash, was the gap between the message coming from the executives and what was being heard at assembly-line and engineering level.
At her home in Cork, Naoise was shocked, but not at all surprised:
“When Boeing was developing the Max models, it deliberately concealed the automated MCAS system, which proved so lethal, from the regulators. It is the aerospace company with the most US violations and fines in the industry. And now it is intentionally concealing evidence relating to this dangerous blow-out.
For its part, Boeing says the 737 Max is its best-selling plane. It gave the TV channel CNN these statistics: “Every day, more than 80 airlines operate about 5,000 flights with the global fleet of 1,300 737 Max airplanes, carrying 700,000 passengers to their destinations safely. The 737 Max family’s in-service reliability is above 99% and consistent with other commercial airplane models.”
We’re back to numbers again. But there is no getting away from the fact that the Connolly Ryan household is missing one person. By right, Mick Ryan should be at the kitchen table now with Naoise and their two children.
Instead, the actions of a giant corporation which, as Naoise says, put profit before safety has turned her vibrant, talented, funny, loving husband into a photograph in a frame.
She took that framed photograph to a meeting at the US Department of Justice in Washington in November 2022. She put it in front of her when she sat down facing the department’s attorney Glenn Leon.
She wanted to look him directly in the eye when she asked him why Boeing executives were not facing criminal prosecutions. She and the other families of the victims, who attended virtually, got no answers.
Naoise was determined to attend in person to make the point that the decisions made in big corporate offices and sprawling justice departments have real impact on people’s lives.
In 2021, Boeing paid a fine of $243.6m (€223.5m), compensation to airline customers of $1.77bn (€1.62bn), and $500m (€458) to the families of crash victims. Naoise refused to accept any compensation, labelling it ‘blood money’. Instead, she joined the many other families affected fighting to hold those responsible to account.
“There needs to be a change of leadership at Boeing and the US Department of Justice must prosecute those ultimately responsible for the manslaughter of Mick, along with seven of his UN colleagues — 346 people in total,” she says.
Hiding information from investigators, she adds, is putting flying passengers at risk. “This is reckless endangerment of human life.”
There has been pushback from the flying public. Since the Alaska accident, more passengers are actively choosing not to fly with Boeing. Flight booking site Kayak has a filter that allows passengers to deselect Max aircraft (models 8 and 9). It has seen a 15-fold increase in people choosing to do so since January, although some airlines are omitting the word Max, instead posting a series of numbers to describe the plane model.
The company’s one-time slogan, “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going” has been turned around to read, “If it’s Boeing, I Ain’t Going” by a number of air travellers determined to highlight the need for tighter safety checks.
The fact that Boeing and its safety record are back in the spotlight offers a shred of comfort to Naoise, but it’s only that.
The real issue, she says, is one of power: “A powerful, faceless organisation, Boeing, sent a defective brand-new plane to Ethiopia and it crashed.
Justice for her means putting a face on those responsible and bringing them to justice. It also means remembering that behind each of the numbers are people whose lives made a real difference.
She feels grief, pain, and loss, but she is not a victim. “Feeling pain is not the same as feeling helpless. I am caring for my children and I am fighting for justice for my husband.”
The words ‘truth, accountability, justice’ are taped to Naoise’s lawyer’s computer screen. They inform his work, she says. They inform Naoise Connolly Ryan’s life too. And she will continue to speak out until she can tell the man in the photograph that she has achieved all of those things for him.
