After a 17-year-long legal battle, Airbus and Air France have been found guilty of “corporate manslaughter” for a 2009 plane crash, which killed 228 people.
Thursday’s verdict by the Paris Appeals court comes three years after a lower court had acquitted the French companies, who have continued to deny the charges against them.
The Paris court further ordered both companies to pay the maximum fine of €225,000, each, adding that Air France and Airbus were “solely and entirely responsible” for the horrific plane crash.
While the conviction comes as a cathartic moment for relatives of the victims of the plane crash, further appeals to France’s highest court from the companies may be filed, dragging out the process for another few years.
What happened in 2009?
On June 1, 2009, an Air France flight AF447 vanished from radar during a storm. The flight, which was an Airbus A330, had 12 crew members and 216 passengers on board.
All 228 passengers and crew were killed when the plane crashed into the sea from a height of 38,000ft. The incident became the deadliest in French aviation history.
Departing from Rio de Janeiro, the Air France flight was headed to Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport. Flight AF447 was due to pass from Brazilian airspace into Senegal and then Cape Verde. However, when the flight failed to make contact with air traffic control, Senegal’s ATC crew tried to contact the aircraft, but received no response.
After multiple attempts of trying to establish contact with the aircraft, an aerial search for the Airbus plane began. The Brazilian Air Force and a French aircraft in Senegal led the search, with assistance from Spain and the US Navy.
The crash prompted a complex recovery operation across the Atlantic Ocean. By early June 1, French officials announced that all passengers and crew on the flight were presumed dead, with no signs of the wreckage.
However, on June 2, wreckage from the plane and signs of oil were spotted by a Brazilian Air Force aircraft, confirming the plane crash.
It wasn’t until five days after the flight disappeared that two male bodies were recovered from the crashed aircraft. After gathering more evidence, it was declared that the flight had crashed and there were no survivors.
An underwater search using submarines was also carried out to locate black boxes, flight recorders, and other debris. As the search continued, the black box of the Air France flight was recovered, two years later in 2011.
What caused the crash?
The final report for the plane crash was published in 2012. As per the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), the accident was caused by a succession of events –
- Inconsistency between speeds due to icing of the pilot tubes, which caused the autopilot to disconnect.
- Inappropriate control inputs made by the crew, which destabilized the flight path.
- Failure of the crew to follow procedure for loss of displayed airspeed information.
- Failure of the crew in the timely identification of a deviation from the flight path
- Lack of understanding of the approach to stall the plane
- Failure to recongise that the aircraft had stalled.
The BEA report indicated that the lack of proper training for the crew and pilots may have been a major factor in the crash.
In 2012, a CBS report added that the design of the Airbus cockpit may have also been a factor in the accident, as the flight controls are not mechanically linked between the two pilot seats.
Both Air France and Airbus were under the scanner for manslaughter since 2011. However, in 2019, the focus came on Air France with the French airline being accused of manslaughter and negligence.
“The airline was aware of technical problems with a key airspeed monitoring instrument on its planes but failed to train pilots to resolve them,” the prosecutor argued.
After a lot of back-and-forth, in 2023, both Airbus and Air France were acquitted of manslaughter. However, another trial was launched in 2025, and a year later, both companies were found guilty due to their negligence and severe safety failures.
