“I lost my wife Carole, my three children Ryan, Kelly and Ruby and I also lost my mum-in-law. I feel so lonely. I look at people. I see them with their children playing outside and I cannot have my children – I’ll never been able to see their faces again or hear their voices.”
Paul Njoroge lost his entire family when Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 crashed six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa on March 10. 157 people died.
Paul is now living between friends’ houses, unable to return home. He can’t bear to see his children’s shoes still in the hall where they last left them. “I can still see their feet inside them. I’m never going back.” He’s waiting for relatives to pack up the home.
When ET302 crashed, it was the second Boeing 737 Max to crash in four months.
The first happened in Indonesia in November 2018. Preliminary reports revealed that the same flight control system was at fault in both crashes. Now, families around the world want to know why 157 people died in a second crash.
They are asking, why weren’t the jets grounded after the first crash?
Chris and Claryss Moore’s daughter Danielle was also killed. One corner of their suburban Toronto home is now a bright but emotive shrine to their lost child. She smiles down from a dozen pictures on the wall, surrounded by orchids and lilies.
Danielle was heading to a UN environmental conference in Kenya.
“This should not have happened, four months after another crash happened. They tell us this is one of the safest planes – it’s not – it took away the lives of the people we love so much and no matter what they’re going to say, our normal lives will never be the same.
This is our normal life, struggling to wake up every single day and that’s hard. It makes me very angry.”
An international blame game is now under way. American Congressman Sam Graves alongside other voices in the US have blamed “foreign pilots” for the crash, saying they believe American pilots would have handled the jet.
But both preliminary reports have stated the flight control system (MCAS) as being at fault.
Families of those killed are now lining up to ask whether the Boeing 737 Max was airworthy and safe when the crash happened. –BBC
