A Paris appeals court has found aircraft manufacturer Airbus and airline Air France guilty of involuntary manslaughter over the 2009 crash of flight AF447 that killed 228 people.
BBC News writes about this.
A Paris court ruled that the companies were “solely and fully responsible” for the tragedy. They were fined the maximum possible under this article — €225 000 each. At the same time, the families of some of the victims called the punishment symbolic.
The appeals court ruling overturned a previous 2023 verdict in which the companies were acquitted. The new trial lasted eight weeks. Air France and Airbus deny the charges and have already said they will appeal the decision.
Flight AF447 crash
On June 1, 2009, an Airbus A330-203 passenger plane, flying flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean during a severe storm.
The disaster was the deadliest in French aviation history, killing all 216 passengers (including 8 children) and 12 crew members. On board were citizens of France, Brazil, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.
The wreckage of the plane was only found after a large-scale search operation at the bottom of the Atlantic, and the flight recorders were recovered in 2011.
In 2012, French investigators concluded that the cause of the disaster was the lack of coordination and poor training of the crew, as well as the malfunction of the speed sensors, which had become iced up.
According to the investigation, the pilots were disoriented by incorrect airspeed readings and, when the plane began to lose speed, mistakenly pointed the nose of the plane up instead of down. After the tragedy, aviation rules for pilot training were changed, and the speed sensors on the planes were replaced.
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