Chicago jury awards $29 million to family of Irish UN worker killed in 2019 Boeing crash

A Chicago jury has awarded $29 million in damages to the family of Irish United Nations worker Micheál Ryan, who was killed in the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash. The verdict, announced by a U.S. court spokesman on Wednesday, marks one of the final civil cases against aircraft manufacturer Boeing over the pair of deadly crashes involving its MAX jets.

The civil lawsuit was filed by Naoise Connolly Ryan, the widow of Michael "Mick" Ryan, a deputy chief engineer for the UN World Food Programme. He was among the 157 people from 35 countries who died when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed near Bishoftu, Ethiopia, on March 10, 2019. The flight was bound for Nairobi, Kenya, and lost contact with air traffic control six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa.

Ryan, who was 39 at the time of the disaster, was originally from County Clare and had been living in Rome to work at the UN agency's headquarters. His career was defined by humanitarian engineering projects across the globe. He had previously led efforts to build 24 Ebola treatment hospitals in Liberia in six weeks and worked on infrastructure to aid Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. His portfolio also included...