The airline Air France and the aircraft manufacturer Airbus were accused of manslaughter because in 2009 more than 200 people died after a plane crashed into the Atlantic.
in France prosecutors announced on Wednesday that neither airline Air France nor aircraft manufacturer Airbus can be tried for the 2009 crash. The plane, which was on its way from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, France, plunged into the Atlantic with 228 people.
At the end of the eight-week trial, the prosecutors exceptionally did not demand that either company be convicted. The companies have been accused of manslaughter, but according to the prosecutors, it was impossible to prove the companies’ guilt. Both companies have denied their guilt.
The three judges in the trial must follow the advice of the prosecutors. The prosecutors said they understand that the decision is not to the liking of the affected parties.
Prosecutors initially dropped charges against the companies in 2019. At the time, families of the victims were outraged, and in 2021 a Paris appeals court overturned the decision and ordered a new trial.
This time, too, the group representing the victims’ relatives was outraged by the decision.
In the central one the so-called pitot tubes, which measure the aircraft’s flight speed, played a role in the hearings. The court was told that during a storm in the Atlantic, ice crystals blocked the pipes, which caused an alarm in the cockpit and the autopilot to shut down.
Technical experts have shown that the pilots acted incorrectly in a stressful situation, which caused the plane to crash into the sea. A former Air France test pilot told a court last month that it will never be known what made the pilots act the way they did.
Airbus, which manufactured the plane, has blamed the accident on pilot error.
Lawyers for the victims’ families stressed that both companies were aware of the problems with the pitot tubes before the accident and that the pilots were not sufficiently trained to deal with similar emergencies. The court was told that in the year before the accident, almost twenty defective pitot tubes were reported on Airbus planes, and both Airbus and Air France had warned their customers and pilots about the problem.
The lawyers criticized Air France’s reaction to the situation as too slow and insufficient. Air France’s defense lawyer said the fatal crash was completely unforeseeable. He stressed that, unlike Airbus, Air France has never criticized pilots.
The incident the attorney general said on wednesday that he understands that the legal processes have taken far too long and that the suffering has started again and again in the past 13 years.
After the accident, the pitot tube used in the Airbus plane in question has been removed from all aircraft worldwide. In addition, the accident caused the industry to develop its training practices, especially in such a way that pilots are taught to operate in highly stressful and unpredictable conditions.
In October, lawyers and victims’ families listened in court for the first time to an audio recording of the pilots’ last minutes. It took almost two years to find the black boxes that store flight data at a depth of almost 4,000 meters.
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