A DAD has told of his heartbreak when he found out his daughter had died on a doomed Boeing flight.
Adrian Toole, 71, said the loss of his daughter Joanna felt "like the end of the world" after he heard of the tragedy via a news website.
Joanna, 36, was travelling to Nairobi, Kenya, in March 2019 to speak to the UN's environment assembly about ocean conservation, with a brief stop off in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
It was the Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis to Nairobi that went down just a minute and a half after taking off due to a fault sensor, killing all 157 people on board.
The sensor incorrectly registered the nose of the plane as being at too steep an angle and automatically pushed it down, causing the tragic plunge.
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Adrian, who found out about his daughter's death online at his home in Exmouth, Devon, told the MailOnline: "It was like the end of the world.
"All that promise cut short.
"It just seems so very unfair — it should have been me rather than her."
An inquest into the deaths of Joanna and fellow humanitarian workers Sam Pegram, 25, and Oliver Vick, 45, in Horsham, West Sussex delivered a damning finding against Boeing last month.
Coroner Penny Schofield accepted the verdict of unlawful killing and ruled that the aircraft manufacturer had engaged in criminal conduct that resulted in the trio's deaths.
Ms Schofield said that Boeing's conduct was "truly exceptionally bad so as to constitute the crime of manslaughter", while the families of those lost slammed the company for playing "Russian roulette" with passengers' lives.
Adrian blasted the 737 Max 8 craft involved in the crash as a "death trap" and questioned why Boeing has not "faced justice" over it.
However, he added that he is "relieved" by the inquests' verdict and was able to find some comfort in it.
Joanna's body was finally repatriated in November 2019, allowing her family to cremate her and scatter her ashes in the sea at her favourite beach in Cornwall.
Four years on, the families are continuing to seek justice and are locked in a court battle in America as they look to overturn a deal struck with the US Justice Department in 2021.
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The deferred prosecution agreement gives Boeing's top executives immunity from prosecution by the federal government in return for a £389 million settlement to the families of two separate crashes.
The company was also ordered to pay £1.96 billion in fines.
However, the families claim they were not consulted over the deal and hope to use the inquest's ruling, which will be submitted as evidence, to have it struck down.
A determined Adrian added: "People say that when your child dies, a part of you dies as well, and that is certainly the case."
