Four months. It has been four months since the hearing of the Rio-Paris trial ended, yet the trial itself is still not over. The verdict is still missing. This will be returned this Monday, April 17, in the afternoon at the Paris Criminal Court. He will determine whether or not Air France and Airbus are found guilty of manslaughter by “clumsiness, recklessness, inattention, negligence or breach of a duty of care imposed by law”. Above all, it will carry the ambition to put an end to a case that began almost 14 years ago in the South Atlantic, with the disappearance in an Air France Airbus A330 on the night of June 1, 2009, the flight AF447.
The judges have already deliberated and probably finished writing their verdict, but they are the only ones to know it today. This is certainly expected by the defendants, who risk a conviction as legal persons, as well as by lawyers, witnesses, experts and perhaps even more broadly the aeronautical world. However, as legal persons, Airbus and Air France do not risk any prison sentence, only 225,000 euros in fines. A scratch for companies making tens of billions of euros in turnover per year. The reputational damage of a conviction would certainly be significant at the time, but should not overshadow them for very long either, even if accusations have been made about the design and equipment of the A330, or about the training and information within Air France.
The anguish of families
The most impatient, or anxious, at the approach of the verdict are to be sought from the side of the 489 civil parties constituted. These are the families of the 228 victims, passengers and crew members, who lost their loved ones that night. Since 2009, they have been waiting for an answer to what happened, a way to try to finally turn the page… even if it means imagining no other outcome than the condemnation of Airbus and then Air France. . The European manufacturer thus constituted a designated culprit for most of the civil parties throughout the hearing, much more than the airline even if the latter was not spared. A conviction would be a strong symbol, a victory. The release would undoubtedly be unbearable to hear, even if it were fair and justified. The fact that the prosecution declared “not being in a position to request the condemnation” had sparked the ire of the families, who had left the court with losses and a crash.
It must be said that the wait has been interminable, even unbearable since the disappearance of the plane in 2009. It had already taken two years to find the wreckage of the Air France Airbus A330, which fell into the sea on the night of June 1, 2009. The technical investigation had in fact stretched in length, before the legal proceedings became aware of many twists and turns between indictments, dismissal, appeal, expertise and counter-expertise. What further reinforce the resentment against the two aviation giants, finally placed in the box of the accused nearly 14 years later.
A complex trial
Despite this, it probably took four more months to establish a verdict, as the case proved to be complex during the two months of hearings, swinging between technical explanations from the experts and the defendants – sometimes contradictory – and emotions lives of the families of victims brought by their lawyers. Even beyond the aircraft, the crew, the manufacturer or the company, it is the whole relevance of the certification system and the commercial aviation safety principles, reputed to be among the most drastic and effective in the world, which have been questioned and sometimes called into question: if everyone has played their part well in addressing a problem such as the high-altitude icing of Pitot probes, if the regulations have been complied with, how is it that such a crash took place?
If Airbus and Air France are condemned despite an aircraft designed and maintained according to the rules, a crew trained and informed in a compliant manner, as established by the technical investigation, justice would therefore take precedence over aeronautical regulations.
To those who maintained that a court was not the place to judge responsibility in an air crash, this trial will have shown the need to sometimes go beyond the technical investigation, if only to allow everyone to try to understand and move forward in the grieving process. And this in large part thanks to the great mastery shown by the three judges, including the president of the criminal court Sylvie Daunis.
