On April 17, the Paris Court of Appeal ruled that Airbus and Air France were guilty of manslaughter in the deadliest plane crash in French history – Flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris in 2009, which killed all 228 people on board.
Under the ruling, both companies were deemed “fully responsible” for the accident and each was fined 225,000 euros ($261,720) – the maximum penalty for corporate manslaughter. Although the fine is largely symbolic, it marks a legal victory for the victims' families after an eight-week trial.
Previously, in 2023, a lower court had acquitted both Airbus and Air France. Both companies have repeatedly denied all charges.
Shortly after the verdict, Airbus announced it would appeal to France's highest court, arguing that the new conclusion contradicts prosecutors' arguments and the 2023 acquittal. Prosecutors had earlier warned of a possible appeal and criticized the companies' conduct throughout the more than decade-long proceedings. “Nothing has changed – not one sincere word of comfort,” prosecutor Rodolphe Juy-Birmann said during the trial in November 2024, calling the entire process “a lack of decency.”
The accident occurred on June 1, 2009, when Flight AF447 vanished from radar en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Two years later, a deep-sea search recovered the plane's black boxes. Investigators determined that the pilots had pulled the plane up while sensors, clogged with ice in a storm over the mid-Atlantic, malfunctioned, causing the aircraft to stall and crash into the ocean.
While Airbus and Air France blamed pilot error, lawyers for the victims' families argued that both companies knew about the problem with the plane's pitot tubes—devices that measure airspeed—but did not train pilots on how to handle emergencies when those parts failed. Air France lawyer Pascal Weil said in October 2024 that the company “had the capability to train at high altitude, but didn't because we truly believed it was unnecessary.”
