Airbus, Air France acquitted over 2009 Rio-Paris crash

Kin of passengers killed are angered over court ruling

PARIS — Airbus and Air France were acquitted of manslaughter charges by a French criminal court on 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 over a decade to bring Airbus, the aircraft manufacturer, and Air France, the main French airline, to trial.

“We are sickened,” Danièle Lamy, the president of Entraide et Solidarité 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 they would not seek convictions, arguing 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 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 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.

Families of some victims have already received financial compensation. But a guilty verdict would have carried the potential to seriously hurt the reputation of the two aviation heavyweights, after a stormy trial in which the families had repeatedly expressed their frustration.

In October, chief executives for Airbus and Air France, who testified when the proceedings opened, were angrily heckled by some of the plaintiffs with cries of “Shame on you!” In December, exasperated by the prosecutors’ decision not to require a conviction, some families angrily stormed out of the courtroom.

“The company will always remember the victims of this terrible accident and expresses its deepest sympathy to all their relatives,” Air France said in statement, according to the news agency Agence-France Presse, while Airbus expressed its “compassion” for the families of the victims. “Airbus reaffirms the full commitment of the company and all its employees to keep prioritizing a safety-first culture across the company and the aviation sector,” the company said in a statement.

Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330, crashed on June 1, 2009, after it was caught in an overnight thunderstorm several hours after leaving Rio de Janeiro for Paris. Ice crystals threw off the plane’s airspeed sensors and its autopilot disconnected.

Investigators later determined the bewildered pilots had faced a barrage of alarms and conflicting data from instruments in the cockpit. In a period that did not even last five minutes, they struggled to regain control of the plane as it stalled, went into a free fall, and slammed into the ocean between Brazil and West Africa.

None of the 216 passengers and 12 crew members survived. The victims included dancers, doctors, engineers, and executives from nations throughout Europe as well as from Africa, Asia, Canada, South America, and the United States. Some were on business trips, others on vacation. Eight were children.

Black boxes from the crash were only recovered from the ocean floor two years later, after lying at a depth of more than 10,000 feet.

In 2019, after years of tortuous investigations and dueling expert reports, magistrates handling the inquiry in France attributed the crash mainly to pilot error and decided to dismiss the case against Airbus and Air France. But a French court overruled the decision in 2021, ordering the two companies to stand trial.