It took a Chicago jury two hours to decide that Boeing owed more than $28 million to the family of Shikha Garg, a 32-year-old United Nations worker who died when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 went down in March 2019. The verdict came on Wednesday, November 12, 2025, at the end of a weeklong trial in federal court.
Reuters called it the first verdict among the dozens of lawsuits brought after the Ethiopian crash and the earlier Lion Air crash in Indonesia, which together killed 346 people. Flight 302 alone claimed all 157 people aboard.
A trial about damages, not blame
The jurors never had to decide who was at fault. Boeing had already accepted responsibility, so their task was narrower: put a figure on what the family lost, from Garg’s future earnings to their grief. The family’s lawyers said $10 million of the award covers the “pain and suffering and emotional distress” she went through before impact.
That point drew the sharpest argument. Boeing lawyer Dan Webb, a former U.S. attorney, urged the jury to settle on “fair and reasonable” compensation and told them the passengers had no time to suffer physically. “There would not have been time for them to feel any physical pain when they hit the ground,” he said. Shanin Specter, for the family, called Garg’s death “senseless” and “preventable.”
The woman on Flight 302
Garg consulted for the United Nations Development Programme and was traveling to a U.N. environmental assembly in Nairobi. She was a citizen of India. Specter described her to the jury as a young, accomplished PhD candidate who had married only months before the flight, and who boarded in a sari with flower garlands in keeping with Indian tradition.
The brand-new Max came down minutes after leaving Addis Ababa. Its pilots fought alarms for six minutes before a final dive at nearly 700 miles per hour, the Associated Press reported. In both Max disasters, flight-control software repeatedly pushed the nose down on faulty readings from a single sensor.
What Boeing will pay
A deal reached the same morning put the family’s total at $35.85 million, Reuters reported: the full verdict plus 26% interest. Boeing agreed not to appeal, the family’s attorneys said. The Associated Press added that a separate arrangement outside court gives Garg’s husband, Soumya Bhattacharya, a further $3.45 million.
A Boeing spokeswoman said the company was deeply sorry to everyone who lost someone on the two flights. Families, she said, “are also entitled to pursue their claims through damages trials in court.”
Most claims never get that far. Boeing says it has settled more than 90% of the civil suits, at a cost of billions of dollars, and three more Ethiopian Airlines families settled on November 5 on undisclosed terms. Lawyers put the number still unresolved at under a dozen.
The criminal side shifted during the same week. A federal judge in Texas approved the Justice Department’s request to drop its long-running fraud case against the company. In return, Boeing says it will pay or invest another $1.1 billion on fines, compensation for families and internal safety and quality work.
Sources
- Boeing ordered to pay more than $28 million to 737 MAX crash victim's family (Reuters, via NBC News)
- Family of woman killed in Boeing 737 Max crash awarded $28 million (Associated Press, via Yahoo News)
