A French appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of manslaughter over the 2009 crash of Air France flight 447, which killed all 228 people on board. The decision reverses a 2023 ruling that cleared both companies of corporate manslaughter after a high-profile trial in Paris.
Flight AF447, an Airbus A330 operating from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, disappeared over the Atlantic on June 1, 2009, after entering a nighttime storm. Investigators later linked the accident to the failure of pitot probes that measure airspeed, leading to the disconnection of the autopilot and leaving the crew to manually control the aircraft at high altitude. Confused and contradictory inputs in the cockpit culminated in an aerodynamic stall from which the aircraft never recovered.
The initial trial acknowledged several acts of negligence by Airbus and Air France but concluded there was no sufficiently certain causal link to support criminal convictions. Families of victims appealed, and the new ruling finds that the companies’ failings met the threshold for criminal responsibility under French law. The judgment comes after years of technical investigation and legal proceedings into one of modern aviation’s most closely scrutinized crashes.