2009 Rio-Paris crash: French court acquits Air France, Airbus

A Paris court, on Monday (April 17) acquitted the carrier Air France and plane maker Airbus over the 2009 crash of a Rio-Paris flight which killed 228 people. The two France-based companies had gone on trial back in October to determine their responsibility for the worst aviation disaster in Air France’s history.

What was the hearing about?

The historic trial started over 13 years after Flight AF447 which was en route fromRio de Janeiro (Brazil) toParis (France) plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board.

The two aviation giants were charged with involuntary manslaughter and have not only denied the charges but also blamed pilot error as the main cause of the crash.

In December, as hearings in the eight-week trial wound up, the prosecutors had said that it would be “impossible” to convict Air France and Airbus which left victims’ families enraged, reported AFP.

The hearings were predominantly about the malfunction of the so-called Pilot tubes, which are used to measure the flight speed of an aircraft which, as per reports, had been blocked due to the ice crystals during a mid-Atlantic storm.

Subsequently, the alarms went off in the cockpit of the Airbus A330 before the pilot switched off the autopilot system and took manual control. Therefore, the technical experts have highlighted how the instrument failure led the aircraft to lose upward lift from the air moving under its wings and it lost altitude.

What was the verdict?

In line with this, the court said Airbus has committed "four acts of imprudence or negligence" which includes not replacing the pilot tubes which they said froze more often on its A330-A340 fleet, as well as “withholding information’ from flight operators.

It said Air France had committed two "acts of imprudence" for the way it disseminated an information note on the faulty tubes to its pilots.

The court said that even if “errors” had been committed, there is “no certain link of causality” between those shortcomings and the accident that ‘could be proven,” reported AFP.

Victims' families reaction to the verdict

As the verdict was being read out, the victims' relatives present in the court stood up and appeared stunned before they sat down again, reported AFP. This comes as the lawyers for the families had argued that both companies were aware of the faulty Pitot tube problem before the crash and that their pilots were not trained to deal with such a situation.

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