Air France and Airbus guilty of corporate manslaughter for 2009 plane crash

A Paris appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter over the 2009 Rio-Paris plane crash that killed 228 passengers and crew in France’s worst air disaster.

The verdict is the latest milestone in a legal marathon involving two of France’s most emblematic companies and families of the mainly French, Brazilian and German victims.

Relatives of some of the 228 passengers and crew who died when the Airbus A330 vanished in darkness during an Atlantic storm gathered to hear the verdict after their 17-year legal battle to pinpoint blame for France’s worst air disaster.

The court ordered the companies to pay the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter, €225,000 (£194,500) each, after the request of prosecutors during the eight-week trial.

In 2023, a lower court had cleared the two companies, both of which have repeatedly denied the charges.

The maximum fines, amounting to just a few minutes of either company’s revenue, have been widely dismissed as a token penalty. But family groups have said a conviction would represent a recognition of their plight.

French lawyers have predicted further appeals to the country’s highest court, potentially dragging the process out for years more and prolonging the ordeal for relatives.

Flight AF447 vanished from radar screens on 1 June 2009, with people from 33 nationalities on board. The black boxes were recovered two years later after a deep-sea search.

In 2012, BEA crash investigators found the plane’s crew had pushed their jet into a stall, chopping lift from under the wings, after mishandling a problem to do with iced-up sensors.

Prosecutors, however, focused their attention on alleged failures inside both the planemaker and airline. Those included poor training and failing to follow up on earlier incidents.

To prove manslaughter, prosecutors needed not only to establish that the companies were guilty of negligence but pull the threads together to demonstrate how this caused the crash.

Under the French system, last year’s appeal proceedings involved a completely new trial with evidence reviewed from scratch. Any further appeals after Thursday’s verdict will shift the focus from the AF447 cockpit to intricacies of law.