An image released on June 8, 2009 by the Brazilian Air Force shows crew members preparing to tow a part of the wreckage of an Air Bus A330-200 jet which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people on board in a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Photo / Getty Images
An image released on June 8, 2009 by the Brazilian Air Force shows crew members preparing to tow a part of the wreckage of an Air Bus A330-200 jet which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people on board in a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Photo / Getty Images
Air France and plane manufacturer Airbus have been acquitted of involuntary manslaughter over the 2009 Paris-Rio crash, which left 228 dead on board flight AF447.
The verdict followed France’s first-ever trial for corporate involuntary manslaughter, for which the maximum fine is €225,000 ($400,000).
Prosecutors had recommended not to seek a conviction at the end of the eight-week trial - a move that had enraged victims' families, who argued they could not simply pass the buck onto the pilots and that the companies were guilty of "negligence and failures".
But on Monday, the Paris criminal court judge said that while both companies had made "errors", such negligence fell short of the certainty needed to establish firm liability for France's worst air disaster.
Daniele Lamy (centre), head of the AF447 Help and Solidarity association, after the verdict on April 17 in Paris that acquitted Airbus and Air France of manslaughter charges over the 2009 crash which killed 228 people. Photo / AP
"A probable causal link isn't sufficient to characterise an offence," the judge told the packed courtroom.
Families greeted the verdict in silence and dismay.
"Our lost ones have died a second time. I feel sick," said Claire Durousseau, who lost her niece in the 2009 crash.
The head of the main association of families said they were "mortified and overwhelmed" by the verdict, which had followed a "chaotic" legal path stretching more than a decade.
“The loser first and foremost is French justice,” Daniele Lamy, the president of the AF447 victims’ association, told journalists at the Paris courthouse.
After a two-year search for the Airbus A330's black boxes using remote submarines, investigators found pilots had made errors when reacting to a problem involving iced-up speed sensors, sending the plane into a freefall without responding to stall alerts.
But the trial also highlighted earlier discussions between Air France and Airbus about growing problems with external pitot tubes that generate the speed readings.
Debris belonging to the crashed Air France flight AF447 is offloaded in the port of Recife, northeast of Brazil on June 14, 2009. Photo / AP
Both companies had pleaded not guilty.
No one risked prison as only the companies were on trial. Air France had also already compensated families of those killed. However, a conviction would have dealt a significant blow to the aviation groups' reputations.
At the heart of hearings in Paris was the role of defective pitot tubes, which are used to measure the flight speed of aircraft.
The court heard how a malfunction with the tubes, which became blocked with ice crystals during a mid-Atlantic storm, caused alarms to sound in the cockpit of the Airbus and the autopilot system to switch off.
‘Why the crew reacted the way they did is a mystery’
Technical experts highlighted how, after the instrument failure, the pilots put the plane into a climb that caused the aircraft to lose upward lift from the air moving under its wings, thus losing altitude.
“For us, what led the crew to react in the way they did remains a mystery in most respects,” Air France representative Pascal Weil, a former test pilot, told the court on November 10.
Airbus has also blamed pilot error as the main cause of the crash during proceedings.
But lawyers for the families sought to demonstrate that both companies were aware of the pitot tube problem before the crash, and that the pilots were not trained to deal with a high-altitude emergency of this nature.
Alain Jakubowicz, a lawyer for the AF447 Help and Solidarity association, answers reporters after the verdict outside the courtroom in Paris. Photo / AP
The model of pitot tube used on the doomed Airbus plane, made by French company Thales, was replaced on aircraft worldwide after the accident.
The crash also prompted an overhaul of training protocols across the industry, in particular to prepare pilots to handle the intense stress of unforeseen circumstances.
On October 17, lawyers and victims’ families were allowed to listen to the chilling in-flight voice recording of the pilots’ final minutes for the first time.
"We've lost our speeds," one pilot is heard saying before a recorded warning sounds - "stall, stall, stall" - and the aircraft begins to plunge towards the Atlantic Ocean.
Acquittal is ‘technically and legally justified’
It took nearly two years to recover the black box flight recorders which were found nearly 4,000 metres below sea level.
Throughout the trial, representatives of Airbus and Air France maintained the companies were not guilty of criminal wrongdoing.
Their lawyers argued their acquittal would be a "difficult" but "technically and legally justified" decision.
Prosecutors initially dropped charges against the companies in 2019 in a decision that also infuriated victims' families.
A Paris appeals court overturned this decision in 2021 and ordered the trial to go ahead.
The court said Airbus committed "four acts of imprudence or negligence", including not replacing certain models of the pitot tubes that seemed to freeze more often on its A330-A340 fleet, and "withholding information" from flight operators.
It said Air France had committed two "acts of imprudence" in the way it disseminated an information note on the faulty tubes to its pilots.
