THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019 61
colleague in a text that MCAS was “run-
ning rampant” and “egregious” in a sim-
ulator. A June, 2018, Boeing document
stated that, if a pilot took more than ten
seconds to react to mistaken MCAS ac-
tivation, the result could be “catastrophic.”
“If we knew then what we know
now, we would have grounded right
after the first accident,” Muilenburg
testified. Yet he demurred repeatedly
when asked if the disasters revealed a
need to rein in the F.A.A.’s delegation
of safety matters to Boeing.
The Stumos sat behind Muilenburg
at both hearings. At the second one,
they were joined by Nader, who clutched
his congressional handbook. At the first
hearing, Muilenburg had opened by
offering an apology to the families, but
had addressed it to the committee. As
he was leaving the hearing, Nadia Mil-
leron called out, “Mr. Muilenburg, when
you say you’re sorry to someone, you
turn to look at them.”
Muilenburg stopped, and looked at
her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
I
n late June, Ralph Nader hosted a
memorial service for victims of the
Ethiopian Airlines flight at the Amer-
ican Museum of Tort Law, in Winsted,
which he opened in 2015 in a former
bank on Main Street. It is an unusual
museum. At the center of the main room
sits a gleaming red Chevy Corvair. Sur-
rounding it are displays on victories for
tort law over corporate negligence, told
with colorful illustrations: tobacco, as-
bestos, the Ford Pinto. There is even a
panel depicting G.M.’s attempt to en-
trap the young Nader by sending a pros-
titute to solicit him at a grocery store.
The memorial service was held in a
windowless, dimly lit room at the back
of the museum. Richard Blumenthal,
the state’s senior senator, spoke, as did
Joan Claybrook, the former president of
Public Citizen, who had sold all of her
Boeing stock and donated the proceeds
to the museum in Samya’s memory.
But the event was dominated by
Nader. In March, I had seen him at the
service for Samya held at the farm. He
sat by himself, with a plate of Lebanese
food, wearing a heavy coat and a wool-
len hat. I offered my condolences. He
nodded, then said, “I will never let Boe-
ing forget her.”
At the museum, he spoke about the
underappreciated centrality of tort law
to American democracy—that the right
of citizens to sue big corporations for
wrongdoing was no less important
than the right to vote or to face a jury
of one’s peers.
There was pride and some defen-
siveness in his remarks. But there was
also a poignant subtext—Boeing was
likely to face a reckoning in court for
the 737 MAX precisely because the other
part of the system that Nader had cham-
pioned over the years, government reg-
ulation, had failed so spectacularly. Nader
and his allies had long ago shown the
harm done by unchecked corporate
greed, but they had been unable to stem
the subsequent undermining of gov-
ernment’s ability to do the checking.
“This is a family that has risen to
the occasion like similar families in other
tragedies to make sure it doesn’t hap-
pen to someone else,” Nader said. “Their
grief will never go away, but it is par-
tially endurable by taking the lead, on
behalf of all of us who fly, to make sure
that the deterioration of the state of de-
regulation and corporate overreach will
not plague the safety of hundreds of
millions of future airline passengers.”
The thought occurred to me then,
as it would many times in the months
to come, that it was striking that this
role should fall to this of all families. It
would be absurd to suggest that they
had been preparing for such a moment,
but it was hard to imagine a family more
prepared for it. To put it another way:
Accountability for the 737 MAX would
very likely have been more contained
and more fleeting had Samya Stumo
not been a passenger on Ethiopian Air-
lines Flight 302.
Michael was the last family mem-
ber to speak. “We don’t want to be up
front on this,” he said. “We want to do
something else. But we have to do this.”
A few months later, I visited Mi-
chael and Nadia at the farm. It was the
first cold day of fall, and Michael was
loading wood into the outdoor boiler
that heats the house. Nadia showed me
two items of Samya’s that had been re-
trieved from the site: her passport and
a journal, both drenched in jet fuel. Mi-
chael gave me a tour of his new barn
and pointed out improvements that he
wanted to make. But he’d be paying
someone else to do them. “My whole
life now is Boeing,” he said.
“If it’s got my ass on it, it’s befitting of royalty.”
••
