PARIS, France—A French court acquitted Air France and plane manufacturer Airbus Monday over the 2009 crash of a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, a ruling victims’ families said left them “disgusted”.
The court in Paris found the companies had committed various errors leading up to the worst aviation disaster in Air France’s history—which left all 228 people on board flight AF447 dead —but that their mistakes could not be proven to be the cause.
While the ruling was expected after prosecutors recommended against seeking a conviction, it was still a huge blow for victims’ relatives, who have waged a 14-year campaign for justice.
As hearings in the eight-week trial wrapped up in December, prosecutors said it was “impossible” to convict the two aviation giants, which were charged with involuntary manslaughter but denied the charges.
If convicted, the two companies would have risked a fine of 225,000 euros ($250,000) as well as significant reputational damage.
As the verdict was read out, relatives of the victims present in court stood up, appearing stunned, then sat down again.
Ophelie Toulliou, who lost her brother in the accident, said she was dazed by the “injustice” of the verdict.
“It makes no sense to me,” she said.
Daniele Lamy, president of the association which represents the victims, said she and others were “disgusted”.
“We expected an impartial judgement, this was not the case,” she said. “All that remains of these 14 years of waiting is despair, dismay and anger.”
In Brazil, victims’ families also voiced outrage.
“The French justice system isn’t serious, it isn’t impartial,” Nelson Marinho, president of the Brazilian victims’ association, told newspaper O Globo.
“This tragedy devastated so many families. I can’t describe what I’m feeling today,” said Marinho, who lost his son in the crash.
‘Imprudence’
The hearings centered on the role of defective “Pitot tubes”, which are used to measure flight speed.
The court heard how a malfunction with the tubes, which became blocked with ice crystals during a mid-Atlantic storm, caused alarms to sound in the cockpit of the Airbus A330 and the autopilot system to switch of.
Technical experts highlighted how, after the instrument failure, the pilots put the plane into a climb that caused the aircraft to stall, then crash into the ocean.
Air France and Airbus blamed pilot error as the main cause.
But lawyers for the families argued both companies were aware of the Pitot tube problem before the crash, and that the pilots were not trained to deal with such a high-altitude emergency.
The court said Airbus committed “four acts of imprudence or negligence”, including not replacing certain models of the Pitot tubes that seemed to freeze more often on its A330-A340 fleet, and “withholding information” from flight operators.
It said Air France had committed two “acts of imprudence” in the way it disseminated an information note on the faulty tubes to its pilots.
But there was not a strong enough causal link between these failings and the accident to show an offense had been committed, it found.
‘Legally justified’
Prosecutors initially dropped charges against the companies in 2019, a decision that also infuriated victims’ families.
A Paris appeals court overturned this decision in 2021 and ordered the trial to go ahead.
Throughout the trial, representatives of Airbus and Air France maintained the companies were not guilty of criminal wrongdoing.
Their lawyers demanded acquittal, describing it as a “difficult decision from a human point of view, but technically and legally justified”.
Air France “takes note of the judgement”, the company said in a statement after the verdict.
“The company will always remember the victims of this terrible accident and expresses its deepest sympathy to all of their loved ones.”
Airbus said the decision was “consistent” with the initial dismissal in 2019.
The group expressed its “compassion” to victims’ relatives.
Flight AF447 was carrying people of 33 different nationalities, including 72 French and 58 Brazilians.
It took nearly two years to recover the “black box” flight recorders, which were found almost 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) below sea level.
