Airbus and Air France cleared of involuntary manslaughter over 2009 crash of Rio to Paris flight

A Paris, France court has cleared both European planemaker Airbus and carrier Air France of involuntary manslaughter relating to the crash of Flight AF447 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in June 2009. However, the two companies were found guilty in a separate civil case, the former being a criminal case. The court declared that Air France and Airbus were jointly responsible for faults which opened the way to damages for the victims’ families. The exact amount of compensation will be announced in September.

According to David Koubbi, a lawyer representing a number of the victims’ families, “The court has decided that while no blame can be apportioned in criminal law, under civil law Air France and Airbus committed four faults and are responsible for damages.”

Flight AF447 was en route overnight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it disappeared off the radar in the middle of a storm over the Atlantic on June 1, 2009. It took four minutes and 24 seconds for the plane to fall 11,500 metres out of the night sky, during which the stall warning sounded 75 times, according to cockpit recordings. The plane’s speed sensors, known as pitot tubes, were said to have iced up, turning off the autopilot, sending confusing information to the crew and setting off a catastrophic chain of events in the cockpit.

Air France and Airbus denied the accusations that their negligence had led to the crash. Airbus blamed pilot error for the crash, while Air France claimed alarms confused the pilots. France’s air investigations authority, the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA), said the crew had responded incorrectly to the icing problem but also had not had the training needed to fly manually at high altitude after the autopilot dropped out. It also highlighted inconsistent signals from a display called the flight director, which has since been redesigned to switch itself off in such events to avoid confusion.