Aviation Safety Advocate Nadia Milleron on Taking on Boeing over Daughter's Death

A jury in Chicago has ordered Boeing to pay nearly $50 million to the family of Samya Stumo, a 24-year-old who was one of a total of 346 people killed in a pair of Boeing 737 MAX jet crashes less than a decade ago. Stumo died aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019, just months after another 737 MAX jet, a recently introduced model at the time, crashed in Indonesia. “They knew that there was a malfunction with the plane. The plane crashed in Indonesia, and then somebody inside the company decided to keep flying the plane and did not fix whatever it is that was wrong,” says Stumo’s mother, Nadia Milleron.

Milleron adds that while her family welcomes the latest settlement, she plans to continue pursuing legal action and serious scrutiny of Boeing’s safety practices. “This trial that we just had was not about accountability,” she explains. “This idea that they can just pay money and then continue on with the same behavior, that’s what we object to, and that’s why we want to expose what they’re actually doing in the company that could have caused these crashes.”