By akademiotoelektronik, 06/11/2022

Flight AF447: a referral to correctional for Air France and Airbus?

The General Prosecutor's Office has requested a referral to correctional for the airline Air France as for the manufacturer Airbus, in the investigation into the crash of flight AF 447 between Rio de Janeiro and Paris which killed 228 people eleven years ago years.

After the case was dismissed in September 2019 by the French national company and the European aircraft manufacturer, to the chagrin of the families of the victims and the SNPL union (the pilots being held solely responsible), the two companies indicted for manslaughter two years after the accident, the Paris prosecutor's office had indicated its intention to appeal. It is now done, the referral to correctional to be heard on March 4, 2021 by the investigating chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal according to judicial sources from the daily Le Parisien.

The General Prosecutor's Office, going further than its predecessors, according to whom only Air France should still be prosecuted, would accuse the latter of "culpable breaches", in particular for not having taken into account the "level of seriousness of the multiple incidents loss of airspeed indication which had occurred on fifteen other flights between May 2008 and May 2009". With regard to Airbus, the public prosecutor's office explains that it would have "underestimated the dangerousness of the anemometric incidents following the icing of the probes". Neither Air France nor Airbus commented on this announcement.

All the passengers and crew members of the Airbus A330-200 operating flight AF447 had perished in the accident, the deadliest in the history of Air France. When the case was announced, the magistrates had considered that "this accident is clearly explained by a conjunction of elements which had never occurred, and which therefore highlighted the dangers which could not have been perceived before”.

According to the BEA report published in July 2012, the in-flight icing of Pitot airspeed probes had led to a disturbance in the speed measurements of the A330 and disoriented the pilots until the aircraft stalled.

©BEA

©Air France

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