The French airline Air France and the construction company Airbus face an accusation of the crime of involuntary manslaughter for the tragedy of flight AF447 in 2009 from this Monday and for the next few months. The 228 occupants who were traveling on board on a flight died in the incident. that connected Paris and Rio de Janeiro and that ended up crashing in the Atlantic.
The long-awaited trial began this Monday and is scheduled to last until December 8. After several investigations and cases that included exhaustive expert opinions and that concluded in 2019, filing the cases against the two companies, the trial has been reopened years later due to the resources of the families of the victims.
The investigating judges determined that the fault of the accident responded to a misinterpretation of the situation by the pilots and, therefore, it was not appropriate to take the airline or its constructor to court.
However, the appeals filed by the families and the French Public Prosecutor's Office made it possible to invalidate the filing of the case thanks to the ruling of the Paris Court of Appeal and seat Air France and Airbus again, who a few days before the accident held talks on improving the airplanes.
Last year, the Paris Court of Appeal responded to the appeals of the relatives and sent the airline back to the dock for considering that "it did not provide adapted training" to the pilots and to Airbus for "having underestimated severity" of the technical failure that occurred.
According to the conclusions of the Office of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) after two years searching for the black boxes, the accident of the Airbus A330, which occurred on June 1, 2009 in the middle of the Atlantic, occurred after ice blocked the probes for measuring the speed of the plane, which meant that the pilots were unaware of this data when they were passing through an area of turbulence.
At that time, they did not apply the appropriate protocol and raised the position of the device until it lost its horizontality, ceased to have lift and was placed in a free fall situation 1,150 kilometers from the coast of Recife (in the northeast of Brazil). The pilots thought they were climbing when in fact they were losing height.
The catastrophe caused the death of 228 people of 33 different nationalities –including a baby and seven children–, of which 73 were French and 58 Brazilian.
His relatives formed an association, AF447, which will be present at the trial as a private prosecution. The representatives of the victims consider that Air France and Airbus "prevented" the pilots from acting correctly.
For its part, Air France has assured in a statement that "it will try to prove that it has not committed any criminal offense that caused the accident and will plead not guilty." Although he has kept silent before the trial, Airbus also defends his innocence.
The possible compensation to relatives could reach a figure of more than 200 million euros. This large economic sum would respond to a precedent of a trial in Brazil against Air France in 2010, in which the company was sentenced to pay a single family 840,000 euros.
