From early childhood, Joanna Toole enjoyed keeping rats in the bedroom of her home in Exmouth, Devon. She said they were extremely intelligent and made good pets.
Other animals she kept included hamsters, a rabbit, two giant African land snails and pigeons, which she trained to fly home.
At secondary school, she discovered some boys tossing stones at a bird’s nest in a hedge. She confronted them, and the boys made up an unkind ditty about her, which spread throughout the school.
For years afterwards, pupils would tease her with the song, but her position was clear, to save animals from unnecessary suffering, even if it meant exposing herself to harm.
When she grew up, Joanna became a consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Unit. Her passion was ocean conservation, in particular the harm done to wildlife by discarded fishing nets. In March 2019, 36-year-old Joanna was invited to speak on the subject at the UN environment assembly in Nairobi, Kenya.
The night before she left, she had dinner with her partner, Paul, at their home in Rome. He worked at the Irish Embassy, and they’d met at a conference four years before. They were planning to move back to the United Kingdom, get married and have children.
Joanna had a short stopover in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, before resuming her journey on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302. There were 149 passengers, from 35 countries, and eight crew members on board.
The aircraft, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, took off at 8.38 am local time on March 10. A minute and a half later, the nose of the aircraft pitched downwards. A faulty sensor had registered incorrectly that the plane was at too steep an angle and was about to stall. This had triggered new software which had automatically forced the nose down.
The captain, Yared Getachew asked what was going on, at 8.39 am, according to the cockpit voice recorder. The pilots laboured to regain control of the aircraft, but the software kicked in and pushed the nose aggressively down.
The pilots tried again. ‘Pull with me’, urged the captain to his first officer Ahmednur Mohammed, but the automated system overrode them. The recording stopped 23 seconds after the pilots’ fourth attempt.
Six minutes after take off, Flight 302 nose-dived at 175mph, crashing into farmland, near the village of Ejere, 32 miles from Addis Ababa, killing everyone on board.
Early that morning, Joanna’s father, Adrian, was at home in Devon when he heard about the crash from the BBC News website.
There’d been five planes flying that morning from Addis to Nairobi, and it took until lunchtime before her partner Paul could confirm Joanna had indeed been on the doomed flight.
Adrian said it was like the end of the world. All that promise was cut short and it just seemed so very unfair, and that it should have been him rather than his daughter.
For the past four years, Adrian, Paul and other grieving families have dedicated themselves to proving that the crash wasn’t a random accident.
It was an avoidable tragedy because Being had prioritised profit over safety, concealed critical safety issues and put the flying public at risk.
As the story unfolded the revelation was that Joanna had perished in a death trap and Boeing as yet have not faced justice.
At an inquest held in Horsham, West Sussex, earlier this month, a coroner delivered a verdict of unlawful killing in the deaths of Joanna and humanitarian workers Sam Pegram and Oliver Vick. Finally, the families had their landmark moment, they’d taken on Beoing and won.
For years, Boeing had evaded and spun, with scores of lawyers, advisers and PR fixers, but now the families had an official ruling that a crime which had led to the deaths of their loved ones had been committed.
Vincent Nichol, the solicitor representing the nine British victims said that Boeing was a behemoth, and to go up against them and get a result like this was David and Goliath feeling.
He said that after so many setbacks, Adrian is still processing the news, and at least it will be of some consolation to him, but of course, it will never bring back his daughter or the other victims that died that day.
Sadly, this is what happens when large companies put profit before the lives of people, and they should be prosecuted, but of course, that won’t bring back the people that perished on that aircraft, and unfortunately, Boeing is one of those companies ruled to be too big to fail, and thus will probably never face consequences.
Boeing knew the plan wasn’t safe and knew that their so-called solution wasn’t good enough, but rushed the aircraft into service for fear of losing business, and then attempted to accuse everyone else, greedy!
Big companies like Boeing have always put profit before people. They cobbled together a cheap solution to a problem they created with appalling engineering, and there should be some prison time for Boeing executives responsible for this avoidable tragedy, and crucially someone chose not to adequately advise the pilots of their decision – they intentionally sent everyone to their deaths in the name of greed!
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 