Air France and Airbus executives must stand trial for failures that allegedly led to the airline’s worst disaster, a crash into the Atlantic that killed 228 people, a court ruled today, reports The Times.
The disaster that engulfed AF447, a night flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in June 2009, became a landmark in training methods and the limits of cockpit automation because it stemmed from the pilots’ failure to understand what was happening to their Airbus A330. They mishandled the aircraft after a temporary anomaly gave faulty speed readings.
Now executives from both companies could face prison terms if convicted at a trial.
An appeal court reversed a 2019 decision by an investigating magistrate to drop the case and upheld the demands by passengers’ families for a manslaughter trial against the airline and the aircraft-maker.
The manufacturer is alleged to have failed to take remedial action over a problem with the pitot tubes on the Airbus A330, which it knew were prone to icing.
The families voiced relief that the appeal court had reopened the case. “It’s a huge satisfaction that we have finally been heard by the courts,” Danièle Lamy, president of an association of victims’ families, said.
When the faulty speed data caused the automatic pilot to disconnect on flight 447, two inexperienced co-pilots failed to understand that the aircraft was in an aerodynamic stall.
It plummeted belly-first into the sea. The captain had been resting on a bunk and arrived on the flight deck in a daze, too late to save the aircraft.
Air France is accused of indirectly causing the crash by providing insufficient training on how to react in case of malfunction of a pitot tube — a sensor that determines an aircraft’s speed through the air.