The plane of the company Smartwings.
Chicago/Houston (USA) – On Thursday, an American court rejected a lawsuit filed by the Czech airline group Smartwings and the Polish airline LOT against the American aircraft manufacturer Boeing. This is reported by the Reuters agency. Airlines demanded compensation for the forced shutdown of Boeing 737 MAX machines. The operation of these aircraft was stopped worldwide in the spring of 2019 after two tragic crashes of 737 MAX aircraft. In March 2020, the Smartwings Group stated that the shutdown caused it damages of about two billion crowns.
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Czech and Polish airlines sued Boeing separately. They claimed that they were entitled to compensation from the American company in the same way as other airlines. These lawsuits are still pending.
The Smartwings group filed a lawsuit against Boeing in early August 2020 in a court in the US state of Illinois, where the aircraft manufacturer is based. “After a long negotiation that lasted a year and a quarter and which was unsuccessful, we filed a lawsuit against the aircraft manufacturer, the Boeing company,” Smartwings spokeswoman Vladimíra Dufková told Lidová noviny (LN) at the time.
How high compensation Smartwings demand, the paper did not say at the time. In March 2020, the spokeswoman for the group stated that the damage caused by the shutdown of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft exceeded two billion crowns. Smartwings had seven of these aircraft at the time and the group was due to receive 15 more by January 2020.
The Boeing 737 MAX aircraft had been in the air for less than two years, entering commercial service in May 2017. In October 2018 in Indonesia and in March 2019 in Ethiopia, two of these aircraft crashed due to a problem with the on-board software, killing a total of 346 people in the accidents.
Shortly after the second of the mentioned accidents, the operation of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft was stopped worldwide. Boeing admitted in May 2019 that it had known about the software problem for about a year, but had not informed airlines or regulators about it.
