Airbus and Air France have been found guilty of corporate manslaughter in the 2009 Rio-Paris plane crash that killed 228 passengers and crew in France’s worst air disaster.
A Paris appeals court on Wednesday ordered both companies to pay a maximum fine of €225,000 each, marking a significant milestone in a 17-year legal battle.
Relatives of the passengers and crew who died when the Airbus A330 vanished in darkness during an Atlantic storm gathered to hear the verdict, following 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.
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, 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 following Thursday’s verdict will shift the focus from the AF447 cockpit to intricacies of law.
