58 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019
miss the annual trade conference. He
was going to Ethiopia, he told them,
to collect his daughter’s body.
After the family got to the crash site,
they settled for less. “It’s a beautiful
place,” Michael said, at a memorial ser-
vice held at the family farm. “It’s on a
rolling high plateau with beautiful vis-
tas and views, hawks everywhere, local
agriculture, people plowing with cattle
and a single-bottom plow. And the Ethi-
opian people are beautiful—Nadia and
Tor were really at peace at that site.
Samya loved East Africa, she loved ag-
riculture, she loved the people.”
T
hree weeks after the crash, Mi-
chael, Nadia, and Adnaan flew to
Chicago, where Boeing has its head-
quarters, to file a lawsuit against the
company in U.S. District Court. All of
the more than three hundred and fifty
737 MAX planes had been grounded,
worldwide, but U.S. regulators were
sending signals that they would move
quickly to get them back in the air. An
F.A.A. board proposed that future pilot
training be done via iPads. The agency
was allowing only fourteen days for
comments on the proposal. Along with
a half-dozen other families, the Stu-
mos submitted a letter, complaining
that this was not enough time to mount
a proper response, and the comment
period was extended to thirty days.
Boeing was desperate to get the 737
MAX flying again—there were more
than five thousand planes on back order,
with dozens coming off the assembly
line every month. Muilenburg vowed
to make “safe airplanes even safer.” The
Stumos saw it as their mission to de-
termine with certainty that the MAX
was safe—even if it meant training
pilots on simulators and putting the
plane through full F.A.A. certification,
a process that could last several years.
But these were short-term fixes. To pre-
vent future disasters, their goal was to
strengthen the regulatory oversight that
had atrophied over time.
In early June, Nadia and her brother,
Tarek Milleron, flew to Washington,
where Michael had secured meetings
with the leadership of the F.A.A. and
the National Transportation Safety
Board. I accompanied them to an apart-
ment in Northwest Washington to pick
up Paul Njoroge, a thirty-five-year-old
Kenyan-Canadian banker who had lost
his entire family in the crash: his wife,
their three young children, and her
mother. The Stumos had been trying
to reach victims’ families around the
world, and Njoroge was among the
first to respond. A trim, handsome man,he stood uncertainly in the apartment.
He wore a dark suit, and looked both
well put-together and utterly at a loss.
We drove downtown to a WeWork
building, where we met Michael, and
discussed the day ahead. They agreed
that Paul, who was especially angry
about efforts to blame foreign pilots for
the crashes, would be the one to con-
front F.A.A. officials on the issue. Paul
said that he preferred not to go on about
the enormity of his loss, because he
worried that the officials’ expressions of
sympathy would allow them to filibus-
ter away the meeting.
Nadia had every intention of talking
about the loss of her daughter. She said
that she would tell them “what I ex-
perience over and over again during
the day, where I think about her fear
and terror.”
Paul said that he understood, but
Nadia wasn’t done: “And then I want
to say that this body that was perfectly
healthy was broken into small bits that
we don’t even have in one place, and
that I am overwhelmed by my grief.”
Again Paul tried to agree, but she
pressed on: “And I want to say, ‘Why
didn’t you protect us? Why, with all the
resources of the United States, didn’t
you make sure that the plane my daugh-
ter was flying in was adequate to fly?’”
The meeting at the F.A.A. left them
frustrated. The agency’s interim chief
at the time, Daniel Elwell, refused to
pledge to ground the 737 MAX until
all investigations had been completed,
and he equivocated on whether sim-
ulator training would be required for
pilots. But, after the meeting at the
N.T.S.B., they left satisfied that the
agency’s report on the crashes would
be rigorous, and grateful for a level of
empathy they felt had been lacking at
the F.A.A. meeting.
Michael caught a plane to Chicago,
while the rest of us headed to Ralph
Nader’s office, on P Street. Nader offered
Njoroge one of the “AXE the MAX”
pins he had designed, urging a boycott
of the plane.
“Khali Ralph,” Milleron said, using
the Arabic term for maternal uncle.“Paul
is new to advocacy and trying to make
things better and right in aviation safety,
for sure, but he is looking for your in-
spiration for how to be effective.”
“That is the only thing that can mo-Samya, in 2017, in Copenhagen, where she was studying global public health.