Air France and Airbus indicted in the deadly 2009 Atlantic airline disaster
A Paris appeals court on Thursday found Air France and Airbus guilty of manslaughter in the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, which killed all 228 people on board after the plane plunged into the Atlantic Ocean during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The ruling came after an eight-week trial in one of France’s most serious aviation disasters.
The court ruled that the two companies bear responsibility for the accident, overturning a previous decision issued in 2023 that acquitted them of criminal liability.Air France and Airbus were fined 225,000 euros each, which is the maximum penalty allowed under French law for this type of crime. However, several relatives of the victims said the punishment was too lenient given the scale of the tragedy.The companies denied any wrongdoing and said they would appeal the ruling through legal means.Daniel Lammy, president of the AF447 Victims Association whose son died in the accident, called the ruling an important step for grieving families seeking accountability. She said the ruling showed that authorities were beginning to recognize “the pain of families facing a mass tragedy of intolerable brutality.”Flight AF447 was carrying 216 passengers and 12 crew members from 33 countries when it crashed on June 1, 2009.
The victims included 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians, 26 Germans, five Britons, three Irish citizens and two Americans. Brazilian Prince Pedro Luis de Orleans y Braganca was among the dead.The disaster remains one of the most complex investigations and recovery processes in the aviation industry. Search teams spent months combing nearly 10,000 square kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean before locating the wreckage.
The flight recorders were eventually recovered in 2011 after deep-sea searches.French investigators concluded in 2012 that faulty airspeed sensors and pilot error caused the accident. Ice crystals clogged the aircraft’s pitot tubes during severe weather, resulting in inconsistent speed readings that overwhelmed the aircraft’s systems. Investigators found that the pilots reacted incorrectly after the plane entered an aerodynamic stall, causing it to quickly lose altitude before crashing into the ocean.The accident led to major changes in aviation safety procedures, including improving pilot training for high-altitude stalls and replacing airspeed sensors on Airbus aircraft.Among the victims was Nelson Marinho Filho, who boarded the plane moments before departure after nearly missing it. His family waited more than two years before his remains were buried. 11-year-old Alexander Bigoroy from Bristol was returning home to England after a holiday in Brazil, while Irish doctors Eithne Walls, Jane Deasy and Aisling Butler also died in the crash as they returned from holiday.According to Air France, the captain had logged more than 11,000 flight hours, including 1,700 hours on board the Airbus plane involved in the accident. The plane had undergone its last inspection in April 2009, weeks before the crash.
