The surviving relatives of the 228 victims of the Rio de Janeiro-Paris flight accident on Whit Monday 2009 have been waiting for this for a long time.

A criminal case against Air France and Airbus for involuntary manslaughter was opened in the new Palais de Justice in Paris on Monday.

Air France CEO Anne Rigail and Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury listened in the courtroom.

It's also about the reputation of their companies.

Michael Wiegel

Political correspondent based in Paris.

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28 Germans were killed when the Airbus 330 with flight number AF 447 got caught in severe thunderstorms over the Atlantic, the pilots lost control and the plane crashed into the ocean within four minutes.

"We hope that it will finally be revealed how this catastrophe could have happened," says Bernd Gans from the German survivors' association HIOP ("survivors of the Airbus crashes Air France 447 and Germanwings 4U9525") on Monday, as he is registering with the court .

HIOP acts as a joint plaintiff and speaks for the German relatives.

Gans describes it as shameful how long Airbus and Air France have delayed the legal processing.

In August 2019, investigating judges dropped the case.

Many questions come back

But in May 2021, the Paris Court of Appeal ordered the case to be reopened.

The Attorney General found it proven that Air France, despite several incidents, had not adequately informed its pilots of technical defects in the Airbus 330 and had not practiced rescue procedures.

At an altitude of 11,500 meters, the so-called pitot tubes from the French manufacturer Thales were iced over.

The pilots no longer had information on speed and altitude.

Gans' daughter Ines, who was 31 at the time, was in the accident plane.

For the opening of the trial, he came from Vaterstetten near Munich to the modern skyscraper in Paris.

"It's going to be tough because all the questions come back," he says.

He doesn't want to sit in the courtroom every day, but will commute between Paris and Munich.

The process is scheduled for nine weeks.

Gans is particularly afraid of the results of the pathological examination.

His daughter Ines is one of the 103 bodies recovered from a depth of 4,000 meters two years after the accident.

The remains of 50 other airline passengers were found immediately after the crash.

Gans sees it as a "slap in the face" that under French law the airline and the aircraft manufacturer could only face a maximum fine of 225,000 euros.

Claims for compensation for pain and suffering have already been settled.

A technical failure

Lawyer Ulrich von Jeinsen from Hanover represents 36 Germans in court.

"They want to know why the accident happened," he says on Monday.

Through the non-profit organization HIOP, they wanted to influence making the technology safer and improving pilot training.

"As the court found in a preliminary investigation, there was a technical failure for which the pilots were not sufficiently trained," says von Jeinsen.

The weakness of the French airline's Airbus 330 fleet was known long before the accident.

Thales' pitot tubes iced up at high altitudes and in difficult weather conditions.

At the beginning of November 2008 there was a circular from the Air France management to all pilots in the long-haul fleet, in which "anomalies" in the speed measurement were pointed out.

However, unlike Air Caraïbes, Air France did not respond by purchasing new pitot probes after dangerous emergencies were reported.

The Air France pilots were also not specifically trained to master emergency procedures.

To make matters worse, Air France had not retrofitted its Airbus 330s with emergency systems that still indicate the speed even if all displays in the cockpit failed.

But the European Union Agency for Aviation Safety (EASA), based in Cologne, did not react either.

Up to the time of the accident, she had received 30 reports of temporary pitot probe failures.

Nevertheless, EASA only prescribed replacing the defective probes after the crash.

Neither EASA nor the manufacturer Thales have to answer in court in Paris.

It is noticeable,

The question of why Air France did not immediately replace the fault-prone probes made in France with American ones should also be clarified in court.

Air France has said Airbus did not recommend it.

At Airbus, on the other hand, it was said that Goodrich was standard on Airbus machines, which is why they did not have an eye on the special equipment of the French machines.

The representatives of the Air France pilots, who are admitted as joint plaintiffs, share the concerns of the bereaved families.

They are outraged by investigators' final report, which blamed pilot error for the deaths of 228 people.

Survivors' spokesman Bernd Gans hopes that the process will not be limited to technical issues and that responsibilities will be clearly defined.