Top aircraft company, Airbus and Air France have been dragged to court in Paris on Monday on the grounds of involuntary manslaughter which had occured in the dastardly 2009 crash of a flight from Brazil, which had killed all 228 people aboard.
The landmark case would also be focusing on the alleged insufficient pilot training and also the reports of a defective speed monitoring probe, which had been quickly replaced on all the planes worldwide in the months after the accident had occurred.
The unfortunate Flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris had reportedly plunged into the Atlantic Ocean when it has been hit by an unprecedented storm in the early hours of June 1, 2009, after it had stalled after entering a zone of strong turbulence.
The Airbus A330 had been carrying up to 12 crew members and 216 passengers, including 61 French. and it has also been reported as the carrier’s deadliest crash. It has also been reported that debris had been found in the following days but it had taken nearly two years to locate the bulk of the fuselage and also recover the “black box” flight recorders.
Air France and Airbus had also been charged as the inquiry progressed, with some experts determining the crash resulted from mistakes which had been made by pilots who had been disorientated by so-called Pitot speed-monitoring tubes that had frozen over in a thick cloud.
Both companies have also denied any formal criminal negligence and investigating magistrates overseeing the case dropped the charges in 2019, attributing the crash mainly to pilot error and this decision had also infuriated victims’ families, and in 2021 a Paris appeals court ruled there was sufficient evidence to allow a trial to go ahead.
“Air France… will continue to demonstrate that it did not commit any criminal negligence that caused this accident, and will request an acquittal,” the airline said in a statement.
Airbus, maker of the A330 jet that had been put into service just four years before the accident, declined to comment ahead of the trial but has also denied any criminal negligence.