Airbus, Air France acquitted for roles in ’09 ocean crash

PARIS — Airbus and Air France were acquitted of manslaughter charges by a French criminal court Monday over their role in the 2009 crash of a flight from Brazil to Paris that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people on board.

The verdict was a bitter disappointment for the families of the victims, who had battled for more than a decade to bring Airbus, the aircraft manufacturer, and Air France, the main French airline, to trial.

“We are sickened,” Daniele Lamy, the president of Entraide et Solidarite AF447, an association of families of the victims, said after the court rendered its verdict, adding that she and members of other families were “desperate, dismayed and angry.”

“Impunity prevails among the powerful,” said Lamy, whose son died in the crash.

But the ruling did not come as a surprise.

At the end of the two-month trial last year, after reviewing all of the evidence, prosecutors had taken the unusual step of announcing that they would not seek convictions, arguing that there was not enough evidence to hold the companies criminally liable.

The court agreed. Before a courtroom packed with journalists and victims’ relatives, the head judge, Sylvie Daunis, read out a summary of the ruling, which acknowledged that the companies had shown “imprudence” and “negligence” in their handling of faulty sensors that were at the heart of the case.

But, the ruling said, there was no evidence that the crash would have been avoided if those failings had not occurred — something that would be required to secure a manslaughter conviction.

“Regarding the mistakes made by Airbus and Air France, no definite causal link with the accident was established,” Daunis said.

Both companies had repeatedly insisted they were not responsible for the accident, which was the deadliest in Air France’s history.

No individual executives or managers were on trial, and Airbus and Air France were each facing a fine of about $246,000 — a negligible figure compared with their bottom lines.

For families of the victims, who were hoping for a guilty verdict, the ruling was as confusing as it was infuriating.

“I’m having a very hard time understanding,” Ophelie Toulliou, whose brother died in the crash, said through tears after the verdict. “It makes no sense.”