Airbus, Air France Found Guilty of Manslaughter Over 2009 Atlantic Crash

A French appeals court found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter on Thursday over the Rio-Paris plane crash, but a 17-year legal battle over the country’s worst aviation disaster is set to continue.

“Justice has absolutely been done,” Daniele Lamy, president of the AF447 victims’ association, whose son was one of 228 people who died in the crash, said outside the courtroom.

Relatives of some of those who died when the Airbus A330 plunged in pitch darkness into the Atlantic during an equatorial storm on June 1, 2009, listened to the verdict in silence.

A lower court had in 2023 cleared the two French companies, both of which have repeatedly denied the charges.

Thursday’s verdict is the latest milestone in a legal marathon involving relatives of the mainly French, Brazilian and German victims and two of France’s most emblematic companies.

The appeals court ordered them both to pay the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter, €225,000 ($261,720), following the request of prosecutors during last year’s eight-week trial.

The fines, amounting to just a few minutes of either company’s revenue, have been widely dismissed as a token penalty but families said corporate reputations were on the line.

Airbus and Air France both said they would appeal to France’s highest court, ignoring pleas from the relatives.

“There is no human, moral or legal justification in continuing this procedure,” said Lamy, who appealed to both companies to stop what she called “procedural harassment.”

Divisions Over Crash Cause

Lawyers had predicted further appeals on legal points and warned these could potentially drag the process out for years.

Families’ lawyer Alain Jakubowicz told Reuters a second full re-trial, rehashing the evidence a third time, could not be ruled out if the Court of Cassation faulted Thursday’s verdict.

Relatives and lawyers sat in a high-windowed courtroom that has witnessed some of France’s most historic trials as a judge read out a list of victims, many sharing the same family names.

The black boxes from Flight 447 were retrieved in 2011, after a two-year deep-sea search that was almost called off.

The trial exposed bitter divisions between the airline and planemaker over the cause of the accident and a gulf between a civil crash report that focused mainly on the actions of pilots and a wider chain of cause and effect highlighted by the court.

Analysts said the ruling was unlikely to alter regulators’ views on the crash, which did not lead to major technical changes. France’s BEA crash investigators found the plane’s crew had pushed their jet into a stall, chopping lift from under the wings, after mishandling a problem to do with iced-up sensors.

Prosecutors, however, focused their attention on alleged failures inside both the planemaker and airline. Those included poor training and failing to follow up on earlier sensor flaws.

To prove manslaughter, prosecutors had to not only establish negligence but also pull the threads together to demonstrate how this caused the crash. Their failure to make that part of the argument stick had resulted in the earlier acquittal.

Lamy said the deceased pilots had been “rehabilitated.”

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(Reporting by Tim Hepher, Makini Brice; editing by Jamie Freed and Alexander Smith)