© Portal / Christian Hartmann
Machine crashed on the way to the French capital in 2009.
It’s been almost 14 years since an Air France plane en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into the Atlantic, killing 228 people. After years of legal tug-of-war, the airline and manufacturer Airbus went on trial in Paris on Monday. Both companies were cleared of suspected manslaughter.
While some of the corporations acted carelessly or carelessly, Presiding Judge Sylvie Daunis said Monday that there was no clear causal relationship to the accident. The companies denied responsibility for the accident and demanded acquittal. The prosecution also said in its closing arguments that it could not demand a conviction.
For the bereaved Bernd Gans from Vaterstetten, Bavaria, who lost his daughter Ines in the crash, a conviction would be “completely unexpected”, as he told dpa.
O Air France Flight AF 447 was caught by a storm front on June 1, 2009 on the way from Rio to the French capital and disappeared from radars. The Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic. 228 people died, including 28 Germans. The cause was not clear for a long time. It wasn’t until May 2011 that the last bodies and the flight data recorder were recovered from a depth of around 4,000 meters.
Didn’t train enough?
Airbus has been accused of underestimating the consequences of a pitot probe failure to measure airspeed. These were frozen in flight. According to the indictment, Air France did not sufficiently train its pilots and prepare them for an extreme situation like that of the accident flight.
An expert report determined in 2012 that the crew was overwhelmed by the situation after the pitot probes failed. In fact, the situation was manageable.
The data from the flight recorders showed that the pilots reacted incorrectly, mainly to alerts about stall on the wings – called “stall” in the jargon of the British pilots.
This caused the jet to rapidly lose altitude and eventually crash. Contrary to what one would expect, however, the stall warning silenced when the speed dropped below a certain point, meaning that the aircraft had stopped flying a long time ago and simply crashed.
Prosecutors said in their closing arguments that it remains unclear why the pilots acted as they did. “At the time, Airbus and Air France could reasonably believe that the training and procedures should have been sufficient to deal with the AF 447 situation.”
Prosecutors said it was impossible for them to prove the company guilty. You cannot ask for a conviction. Gans, who is one of about 500 joint plaintiffs in the lawsuit, found the plea one-sided.
Airbus and Air France, which denied responsibility for the crash, demanded acquittal. Airbus’ defense insisted on only listening to the law and asked that a “humanly difficult but technically and legally justified decision” be taken.
Big step
For the bereaved, the trial was a big step. Gans also said that he was very happy that the lawsuit went ahead. Because the accident was followed by years of legal tug-of-war. In 2019, investigating judges initially dismissed one case.
The reasoning at the time: the accident was due to a combination of elements that had never happened before. In 2021, an appeals court sent Airbus and Air France to the dock. Regardless of the verdict, Gans said of the lawsuit, “Overall, it was incredibly important.”
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