Airbus, Air France guilty of manslaughter in 2009 crash
Airbus and Air France were found guilty of corporate manslaughter by a Paris appeals court in connection with the 2009 Rio-Paris plane crash that killed 228 passengers and crew, three years after they were acquitted in a lower court.
Relatives of some of those killed when an Airbus A330 disappeared in the dark and crashed into the Atlantic during a storm listened silently to the verdict after a 17-year legal battle over responsibility for France’s worst air disaster.
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 appeal court ordered them both to pay the maximum fine of 225,000 euros ($A366,500) for corporate manslaughter, at the request of prosecutors during an eight-week trial last year.
The fines, which amounted to just a few minutes of both companies’ revenue, were widely dismissed as a token penalty.
But family groups said a conviction would amount to official recognition of their plight.
French lawyers predicted that there may be more applications to the country’s highest court, which could take years for the process and extend the relatives’ ordeal.
But the hearing was seen as a cathartic moment for many relatives and turned a new chapter in a nearly two-decade-long infighting at France’s aviation authority over the cause of the crash that has led to changes in education.
Any appeal following Thursday’s decision will shift the focus from the AF447 cockpit to the intricacies of the law.
As relatives and lawyers sat in a courtroom with high windows, the judge read a list of victims, many of whom shared the same last name.
Flight AF447 disappeared from radar screens on June 1, 2009, with passengers from 33 nationalities.
The plane’s black boxes were found two years later following a deep-sea search.
In 2012, 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 follow up on previous incidents.
To prove manslaughter, prosecutors had to not only find that the companies were guilty of negligence, but also pull together the threads to show how it caused the crash.
