Ok then - as soon as this latest action was brought, Boeing should have offered $1 Billion per passenger and $1 Billion per extended family member. Wipe the company clean, all the retirement funds, every supplier, every employee bankrupted, and pull Boeing as manufacturer of record for every plane they have built. This will wipe out American and Southwest and maybe even Ethiopian. Revenge will only be complete when Boeing no longer exists.
But is $1 Billion each enough? Maybe it should be more.
Because pain is immeasurable and cannot be offset with cash, the families will still hurt - and they will always hurt. And this latest legal action will not extinguish that pain - it will enhance it. Both sides representing this are cynical and cruel. Neither side will admit a dollar value to place on human life. They each have a number, but they know that making that evaluation is morally corrupt. If the defense makes an offer, the plaintiffs will reject it as "too little." So they intend to compel a jury to make that decision for them, a jury forced to take the immoral task of picking a monetary value for human life and human suffering.
I see no mention of that monetary value here either. Why not?
I agree - it "looks bad" because that is the goal of the plaintiffs lawyers. They made an infinite demand without evidence. What would the typical reaction be?
I don't question lead counsel's ability. His is an appealing, if lacking in concrete evidence, argument, the sort lawyers are rewarded for making. And it is helped that it is fueled by outrage from a false story - of brave pilots doing everything correctly and per the procedures and still the plane's control was wrested from them as certainly as if the wings had been cut off. Based on that falsehood there could be only one source of the event.
The claims for Ethiopia are heavily weighed by their acceptance and operation of a plane with a known defect by pilots never trained to manage the documented defect, nor for management of long recognized, unrelated problems. We could know exactly the names of the people who made that sequence of decisions, perhaps discover the reasons they had. But there's no money to be had from them.
"(The fact that the DC-10 was a "perfectly flyable airframe" ... " It was not - why this gross misrepresentation?