Airbus and Air France declared themselves innocents of manslaughter on Monday at the beginning of a new two-month trial on France’s worst air disaster, 16 years after a jet bound for Paris fell into the Atlantic, killing all passengers and crew.
A French court of first instance acquitted the two guilty homicide companies in 2023, after a historic public judgment on the disappearance of the AF447 flight while doing the Rio de Janeiro Route to Paris on June 1, 2009.
Prosecutors resorted to the result and the families of many of the victims pledged to fight to establish criminal offenses in weeks of expert technical evidence to be analyzed at the Paris Court of Appeals Between November now and the end of November.
Free list
10 Small Caps to Invest
The list of actions of promising sectors of the Scholarship
Dozens of relatives rose and remained silent in mourning while a French appeal judge read the names of each of the 228 people who died when the Airbus A330 passenger jet fell into the ocean during a night equatorial storm.
The chief executives of the aircraft manufacturer and the airline paid tribute to the suffering of mourned families, but denied any criminal liability for the accident.
“He is forever recorded in our memories,” Air France President Anne Rigail told the crowded court with tall windows.
Continues after advertising
“Any accident is a failure,” Airbus President Guillaume Faury told the three judges panel, adding that the aviation sector is constantly examining to ensure that flying is as secure as possible.
After a two-year search for the A330 black boxes, the French researchers found that the pilots had dealt badly with the temporary loss of frozen speed sensor data and pushed the jet into an aerodynamic stole, or free fall, without responding to alerts.
But the first trial, more than a decade later, also clarified discussions between Air France and Airbus, even before the accident, about growing problems with sensors, or “pitot probes” that generate speed readings.
Continues after advertising
After nine weeks of evidence, a Paris judge listed four acts of negligence from Airbus and one by Air France, but concluded that they were not enough, according to French criminal law, to establish a definitive connection to the loss of jet during a storm at midnight.
Family prosecutors and lawyers will use the appeal weeks to try to persuade judges that there was a direct connection between the previously identified negligence and the accident.
Changes
“It is painful for families to reopen everything 16 years later, but it is essential to continue and demonstrate that there was criminal guilt,” said Sebastien Busy, a lawyer for one of the victims ‘main relatives’ associations.
Continues after advertising
“If you remove one of these acts of negligence, then the accident would never have happened,” he told Reuters.
Both companies systematically denied any criminal irregularity.
The maximum corporate guilty homicide fine is only 225,000 euros, but prosecutors believe that a new trial will help provide a cathartic effect to families, who have protested against the previous verdict.
The AF447 disaster was one of the most widely debated in aviation and led to a series of technical and training changes.
Continues after advertising
Prosecutors argued that Airbus reacted very slowly to the increasing number of speed incidents and that the airline did not do enough to ensure that pilots were properly trained.
The previous trial exposed the bitter divisions between two of France’s leading companies on the pilot’s and sensor’s relative roles in the worst air disaster in the country.
Appeal hearings are expected to take place until November 27 or 28.
