Airbus, Air France found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 Atlantic crash

PARIS – Airbus and Air France were found guilty on May 21 of corporate manslaughter by a Paris appeals court over the 2009 Rio-Paris plane crash that killed 228 passengers and crew, three years after being acquitted in a lower court.

“Justice has absolutely been done,” Ms Daniele Lamy, president of the AF447 victims’ association, who lost her son in the accident, said outside the courtroom.

Relatives of some of those who died when the Airbus A330 vanished in darkness and plunged into the Atlantic during a storm listened to the verdict in silence after a 17-year legal battle over responsibility for France’s worst air disaster.

A lower court had in 2023 cleared the two French companies, both of which have repeatedly denied the charges.

The verdict on May 21 is the latest milestone in a legal marathon involving relatives of the mainly French, Brazilian and German victims and two of France’s most emblematic companies.

The appeals court ordered the companies to pay the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter, €225,000 (S$334,000) each, following the request of prosecutors during the eight-week trial in 2025.

The 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.

Airbus said it would appeal to France’s highest court to address legal matters raised by the trial.

But Ms Lamy urged the planemaker and Air France not to take the case any further.

“There is no human, moral or legal justification in continuing this procedure,” she told reporters.

Lawyers had said further appeals to France’s highest court would potentially drag the process out for years, prolonging the ordeal for relatives.

Any appeals will shift the focus from the AF447 cockpit to the intricacies of law.

Relatives and lawyers sat in a high-windowed courtroom that has witnessed some of France’s most historic trials as a judge read out a list of victims, many sharing the same family names.

The trial was seen as a cathartic moment for many relatives, turning the page on almost two decades of in-fighting within France’s aviation establishment over the cause of the crash, which led to changes in training.

Flight AF447 vanished from radar screens on June 1, 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. REUTERS