A Paris court found two pillars of France’s aviation industry, Air France and Airbus, guilty of corporate manslaughter on Thursday in connection with the fatal crash of Air France Flight 447 in 2009.
The accident, which killed all 228 passengers and crew on board the Airbus A330, set off years of legal wrangling in Europe and Brazil as family members of those killed looked to secure compensation and an apology. Thirty-three nationalities were represented on the transatlantic flight; the majority of the passengers were from France, Brazil, and Germany.
Prosecutors who brought the case to trial last year allege that failures inside both companies, including poor training and mishandling of earlier incidents, led directly to the crash of Flight 447.
A lower court cleared Air France and Airbus of all charges in 2023, but that decision was effectively reversed by Thursday’s ruling. The two companies deny any wrongdoing and are expected to appeal the verdict, which could send the case to France’s highest court.
Air France and Airbus were both ordered to pay the maximum penalty for corporate manslaughter, €225,000, or about $260,780.
There is no direct equivalent to the crime of corporate manslaughter in U.S. law. Some news outlets outside France reported the convictions as involuntary manslaughter.
Flight 447 disappeared from radar on June 1, 2009, over the Atlantic Ocean while traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Investigators determined that icing on the aircraft’s pitot tubes resulted in inaccurate airspeed measurements, which caused the autopilot to disconnect. The pilots reacted incorrectly and inadvertently pushed the airplane into an unrecoverable stall.
The incident stunned the aviation world, since the aircraft vanished without a distress call and seemed to have fallen out of the sky. The A330 was also considered to be among the safest commercial aircraft in the world.
France’s Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety released three interim reports and a final report detailing the technical and human factors that contributed to the crash. A transcript of the flight’s cockpit voice recorder showed a gradual breakdown in communication and task-sharing among the pilots as they struggled to control the aircraft.
French authorities began investigating Air France and Airbus for manslaughter in 2011 after determining that the carrier was aware of technical problems with airspeed monitoring systems on its airplanes and failed to train pilots to resolve them. The case was dropped in 2019 for lack of evidence but revived in 2021.
