French court opens new trial on AF447 crash 16 years ago

A French appeals court will begin a new trial of Air France and Airbus, 16 years after a jetliner plunged into the Atlantic killing all 228 people on board, including three young Irish women.

Jane Deasy from Co Dublin, Eithne Walls from Co Down and Aisling Butler from Co Tipperary died in the crash on 1 June 2009.

All three were doctors and were returning home from a holiday in Brazil.

A lower French court cleared both Air France and Airbus of corporate manslaughter in 2023, following a historic public trial over the disappearance of flight AF447 while en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

After a two-year search for the A330’s black boxes, French investigators found pilots had mishandled the temporary loss of data from iced-up speed sensors and pushed the jet into an aerodynamic stall, or free fall, without responding to alerts.

But the trial more than a decade later also shed light on discussions between Air France and Airbus about growing problems with the sensors, or “pitot probes”, that generate speed readings.

Following nine weeks of evidence, a Paris judge listed four acts of negligence by Airbus and one by Air France, but found these were not enough under French criminal law to establish a definitive link to the loss of the jet during a midnight storm.

The new trial is expected to stretch over two months of hearings, during which lawyers for victims’ families will try to persuade appeal judges that there was a direct link between the previously identified negligence and the crash.

“It is painful for the families to reopen everything 16 years later, but it is essential to keep going and demonstrate that there was criminal culpability,” said Sebastien Busy, a lawyer for one of the main associations of victims’ relatives.

“If you take one of those acts of negligence away, then the accident would never have happened,” he told Reuters.

Both companies have consistently denied any criminal wrongdoing.

The maximum fine for corporate manslaughter is just €225,000, but prosecutors believe a new trial will help to provide a cathartic effect for families, who protested against the earlier verdict.

The AF447 disaster has been among the most widely debated in aviation and led to a number of technical and training changes.

Prosecutors have argued that Airbus reacted too slowly to the rising number of speed incidents and that the airline failed to do enough to ensure pilots were adequately trained.

The earlier trial exposed bitter divisions between two of France’s flagship companies over the relative roles of pilot and sensor in the country’s worst air disaster.

The chief executives of Airbus and Air France, part of Franco-Dutch Air France-KLM, are expected to make statements during the opening hearing, which starts today.