Airbus, Air France Found Guilty in 2009 Rio-Paris Crash

Airbus SE and Air France were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the deadly crash of a passenger jet en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro 17 years ago after a French appeals court overturned a previous ruling.

The companies were solely culpable for the accident that killed all 228 passengers and crew on board the Airbus A330, the Paris appeals court said on Thursday. The companies were also ordered to pay €225,000 ($260,990)—the maximum fine allowed.

The European planemaker and French unit of Air France-KLM had been cleared of the charges in April 2023 after a lower court ruled that they’d made some errors of “imprudence” but found “no indisputable link of causality” with the accident. Paris prosecutors appealed that decision.

Both Airbus and Air France said they would appeal the latest ruling before the Cour de Cassation. The planemaker added in a statement that the Paris decision contradicted submissions from the public prosecutor’s office and the 2023 acquittal judgement.

In a separate statement, Air France said it was “aware that this appeal prolongs what has already been a lengthy process, particularly for the families,” and noted that its criminal liability “had previously been ruled out twice.”

Air France Flight 447 plunged 38,000 feet (11,582 meters) in three minutes into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, the deadliest episode in the airline’s history. After the crash, attention focused on three sensors that measure airspeed which became clogged with ice when the pilots were about four hours into the flight.

Top photo: Investigators inspect debris from the mid-Atlantic crash of Air France flight 447 at the CEAT aeronautical laboratory in Toulouse, France in 2009. Photographer: Eric Cabanis/AFP/Getty Images. Bloomberg.