Airbus and Air France were acquitted for the tragedy of the Rio-Paris flight in 2009

Almost fourteen years after the catastrophe of the flight AF447the Paris court ruled that while the European manufacturer and the French airline committed “faults”, no “certain causal link (…) could be shown” to the accident.

The court delivered its decision to a room full of relatives of the victims, teams from Air France and Airbus, and journalists. When the acquittal was known, some civil parties stood up in surprise, while the president followed her reading in deathly silence.

According to the verdict, the “mistakes” of the companies increased the chances of the accident occurring, for which the French airline and the manufacturer are “civilly responsible” for the damages.

The court postponed the question of the assessment of damages to a hearing on September 4.

“We expected an impartial verdict, it has not been the case. We are disgusted,” said Danièle Lamy, president of the Entraide et Solidarité AF447 association, which represents the families of the victims.

“Of these 14 years of waiting, nothing remains but hopelessness, dismay and anger,” he added.

“They tell us: ‘Responsible but not guilty’. And it is true that we expected the word ‘guilty’,” said Alain Jakubowicz, a lawyer for the association.

“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Ophélie Toulliou, who lost her brother in the accident, reacted with a trembling voice, sharing her “feeling of injustice” and “misunderstanding.”

Air France stated that it “takes note of the verdict” in a statement. “The company will always remember the victims of this terrible accident and expresses its deepest compassion to all their families.”

For its part, Airbus considered that the decision is “consistent” with the dismissal pronounced at the end of the investigation in 2019, and also expressed its “compassion” and its “total commitment (…) in terms of aviation safety.”

On June 1, 2009, the plane operating flight AF447 between Rio de Janeiro and Paris crashed in the middle of the night while flying over the Atlantic Ocean, a few hours after takeoff.

All 216 passengers and 12 crew on board died in the deadliest accident in the history of French airlines.

On board the plane, an A330 were passengers of 33 nationalities, including 61 French, 58 Brazilian, two Spanish and one Argentine. The 12-person crew consisted of 11 French and one Brazilian.

The verdict created great expectations, after a marathon procedure marked by conflicting opinions from the magistrates. At the end of the trial, which took place from October 10 to December 8, the prosecution requested the acquittal of both companies, considering that it was “impossible to prove” their guilt.

In the days after the accident, the first remains of the plane and the bodies were found. But the fuselage was not located until two years later, at a depth of 3,900 meters.

The black boxes confirmed that the pilots, disoriented by a failure when the Pitot velocity probes froze in the middle of the night near the equator, were unable to stop the plane from falling, which occurred in less than five minutes.

The court found that Airbus committed “four imprudent or negligent actions”, notably not having replaced the models of Pitot probes called “AA” on the A330 and A340 aircraft, which seemed to freeze more frequently and had shown failures in the previous months.

The French manufacturer also reportedly withheld information from the airlines, and should have updated its stall procedure, according to the court.

Air France committed two “imprudences” regarding the modalities of diffusion of a preventive note on the freezing of the probes, addressed to its pilots.

However, for the court, in the criminal sphere “a probable causal relationship is not enough to classify a crime”, since it would have to be demonstrated that without those errors “the death of the victims would not have occurred”.