A French appeals court on Thursday found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter over the Rio-Paris plane crash, but a 17-year legal battle over the country’s worst aviation disaster will continue.
“Absolutely justice has been done,” Daniele Lamy, president of the AF447 victims’ association, whose son was one of the 228 people who died in the crash, said outside the courtroom.
Relatives of some of those who died when the Airbus A330 plunged into darkness in the Atlantic during an equatorial storm on June 1, 2009, listened to the verdict in silence.
In 2023, a lower court acquitted the two French companies, which have repeatedly denied the charges.
Thursday’s verdict is the latest milestone in a legal marathon involving relatives of the victims, mainly French, Brazilian and German, and two of France’s most emblematic companies.
The appeals court ordered them both to pay the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter, 225,000 euros ($261,720), following a request by prosecutors during the eight-week trial last year.
The fines, which represent just minutes of either company’s revenue, have been widely dismissed as a symbolic sanction, but the families said corporate reputation was at stake.
Both Airbus and Air France said they would appeal to France’s highest court, ignoring pleas from relatives.
“There is no human, moral or legal justification to continue with this procedure,” said Lamy, who called on both companies to stop what he described as “procedural harassment.”
Divisions by the cause of the accident
Lawyers had predicted further appeals on legal issues and warned they could drag out the process for years.
The families’ lawyer, Alain Jakubowicz, told Reuters that a full second trial, repeating the evidence a third time, could not be ruled out if the Court of Cassation criticized Thursday’s verdict.
Relatives and lawyers sat in a room with high windows that has seen some of France’s most historic trials as a judge read a list of victims, many of whom shared the same last names.
The black boxes from Flight 447 were recovered in 2011, after a two-year deep-sea search that was nearly called off.
The trial exposed bitter divisions between the airline and the planemaker over the cause of the crash and a chasm between a civilian accident report that focused primarily on the pilots’ actions and a broader chain of cause and effect highlighted by the court.
Analysts said the ruling was unlikely to alter regulators’ views on the crash, which did not lead to any major technical changes. French BEA crash investigators found that the plane’s crew had pushed their plane into a stall, cutting lift under the wings, after mishandling an issue involving frozen sensors.
Prosecutors, however, focused their attention on alleged failures both within the plane maker and the airline. These included poor training and failure to follow up on previous sensor failures.
To prove involuntary manslaughter, prosecutors not only had to establish negligence but also piece together the threads to show how this caused the accident. His failure to assert that part of the argument had resulted in the previous acquittal.
Lamy stated that the deceased pilots had been “rehabilitated.”
