Airbus, Air France found guilty of corporate manslaughter in 2009 crash

More than 16 years after Air France Flight AF447 plunged into the Atlantic, a Paris appeals court has convicted Airbus and Air France of corporate manslaughter in the 2009 Rio-Paris disaster, the deadliest plane crash in France’s history, which claimed 228 lives.

Among those killed were three Irish women: Jane Deasy of Co Dublin, Eithne Walls of Co Down and Aisling Butler of Co Tipperary.

All three were doctors travelling home after a holiday in Brazil.

The ruling marks a new chapter in a long-running legal battle that has pitted two of France’s most high-profile companies against relatives of the victims, who were mainly French, Brazilian and German.

The court imposed the maximum corporate manslaughter fine on both companies, ordering Airbus and Air France to pay €225,000 each, in line with prosecutors’ requests during the eight-week trial.

A lower court had acquitted both firms in 2023, and each company has consistently rejected the allegations.

Those maximum fines — equivalent to only a few minutes of revenue for either business — have been criticised as largely symbolic. For many families, however, a guilty verdict carries weight as formal acknowledgment of what they have endured.

228 passengers and crew were killed when the Airbus A330 disappeared into the night during an Atlantic storm

Further appeals seen likely

French lawyers say the case is likely to move on to the country’s highest court, a step that could extend proceedings for years and deepen an ordeal that has already lasted more than a decade for grieving relatives.

Flight AF447 dropped off radar on 1 June 2009 with people from 33 nationalities on board. Its black boxes were not recovered until two years later, after an extensive deep-sea search.

In 2012, investigators from the BEA concluded that the crew had put the aircraft into a stall — stripping the wings of lift — after mishandling an incident linked to iced-up sensors.

Prosecutors instead trained their case on what they said were failings within both the aircraft manufacturer and the airline, including inadequate training and a failure to act on earlier warning incidents.

To secure manslaughter convictions, prosecutors had to do more than show negligence; they also had to connect that negligence directly to the cause of the crash.

Under French law, last year’s appeal amounted to a full retrial, with judges re-examining the evidence from the ground up. Any new appeals after Thursday’s decision are expected to turn away from the events in the AF447 cockpit and focus instead on points of law.