The Court of Paris acquitted this Monday (17) Airbus and Air France in the case of the accident that occurred on June 1, 2009 with flight 447, between Rio de Janeiro and Paris.
At the time, the plane that made the route, an Airbus A330-203 operated by Air France, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, causing the death of its 228 occupants, including 58 Brazilians.
At the end of a 13-year investigation, the two companies ended up in court accused of involuntary manslaughter in one of the deadliest plane crashes in the past 20 years.
After three months of proceedings, at the end of 2022, the French Public Prosecutor’s Office had aligned its defense with most of the thesis of the two companies, considering it “impossible to prove” the fault of the accident, which infuriated associations of victims, such as Ajuda Mutual and Solidarity AF447.
The President of the Court, Sylvie Daunis, upheld the acquittal by pointing out, in the reading of the sentence, that “there was no secure causal link between the imprudence/negligence and the accident”.
The key to the judgment was whether the accident was due to the pilots’ lack of preparation, which would be attributable to Air France; a failure in the speed measuring device, which would be the responsibility of Airbus; or if, as was considered during the investigation, everything was due to the inexperience of the pilots, who died in the accident.
Precisely the plane’s speed gauge, which failed when it froze in the middle of a storm in the Atlantic, was one of the keys to the process.
With this device obstructed, the pilots lost their orientation until they fell into the water. The flight commander, the most experienced of the crew, was asleep when the accident occurred.
Airbus had defended itself against the malfunction of its aircraft, claiming that the model of the Pitot probe, from the French company Thales and used by the plane, was being replaced by the Goodrich probe, manufactured in the United States.
In the June 1, 2009 crash, all 228 people on board the plane (216 passengers and 12 crew) were killed, including an infant and seven children. The victims were of 33 different nationalities, 73 French and 58 Brazilian.
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