Airbus, Air France found guilty of manslaughter over crash that killed 228 people
Tim Hepher
A French appeals court found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter over the Rio-Paris plane crash, but the 17-year legal battle over the country’s worst aviation disaster will continue.
“Justice has definitely been served,” said Daniele Lamy, president of the AF447 victims’ association, whose son was one of 228 people killed in the crash, outside the courtroom.
Relatives of some of those who lost their lives when the Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic in pitch darkness during the equatorial storm on June 1, 2009, listened silently to the decision.
A lower court acquitted the two French companies in 2023, and both had repeatedly denied the charges.
Thursday’s verdict was the latest milestone in a legal marathon attended mostly by relatives of the French, Brazilian and German victims and two of France’s most emblematic companies.
The appeals court ordered them both to pay the maximum fine of €225,000 ($365,420) for corporate manslaughter, at the request of prosecutors during last year’s eight-week trial.
The fines, which accounted for just a few minutes of both companies’ revenue, were widely dismissed as a token punishment, but the families said corporate reputations were at stake.
Airbus and Air France said they would ignore the demands of their relatives and appeal to France’s highest court.
Lamy called on both companies to stop what he called “procedural harassment” and said, “There is no human, moral or legal justification for continuing this procedure.”
Lawyers predicted more appeals on civil matters and warned that they could drag out the process for years.
The families’ lawyer, Alain Jakubowicz, told Reuters that a second retrial and the reintroduction of evidence for a third time could not be ruled out if the Supreme Court was wrong in Thursday’s ruling.
Relatives and lawyers sat in the high-windowed courtroom that has witnessed some of France’s most historic trials as a judge read a list of victims, many of whom shared the same surname.
Flight 447’s black boxes were recovered in 2011 after a two-year deep-sea search that was nearly aborted.
‘Justice has definitely been served.’
Daniele Lamy, president of AF447 victims association
The hearing revealed bitter disagreements between the airline and the aircraft manufacturer over the cause of the crash and the gap between the civilian accident report, which focused mainly on the pilots’ actions, and a broader chain of cause and effect highlighted by the court.
Analysts said the decision was unlikely to change regulators’ view of the crash and that it did not lead to major technical changes.
France’s BEA accident investigators found that the aircrew pushed the jet into a stall after mishandling a problem with icy sensors, cutting off lift from under the wings.
But prosecutors focused their attention on alleged failures within both the aircraft manufacturer and the airline. These included inadequate training and failure to track previous sensor flaws.
To prove manslaughter, prosecutors had to pull together the threads to not only establish negligence but also show how it caused the crash. Their failure to make this part of the argument stick has previously resulted in acquittal.
Lamy said the dead pilots were “rehabilitated”.
Reuters
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