The public prosecutor's office has requested a trial for "involuntary homicides" against Air France and Airbus, following the fatal crash of the Rio-Paris flight.
228 people had died in this accident in 2009 and which ended in a disputed non-place in 2019.
The public prosecutor's office requested a trial for "involuntary homicides" against Air France and Airbus in the crash of a Rio-Paris plane which left 228 people dead in June 2009, unlike the investigating judges who had pronounced a dismissal in 2019, we learned Wednesday from a judicial source.
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A disputed non-place
The investigating chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal will rule on March 4 on whether or not Airbus and Air France companies are to be sentenced for “manslaughter”, said the judicial source, confirming information from the Parisian.
These requisitions go beyond those of the Paris prosecutor's office, which had appealed against this dismissal, but had only called for a lawsuit against the airline alone.
In August 2019, the two investigating judges in charge of the investigation into the crash of flight AF447, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, pronounced a dismissal.
All the passengers and crew, of 34 nationalities, were killed in the crash, the deadliest in the history of the French company.
The civil parties protested against this "very questionable", "absurd and corporate" decision.
An unprecedented accident
The magistrates considered that "this accident is clearly explained by a conjunction of elements which had never occurred, and which therefore highlighted dangers which could not have been perceived before".
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The investigation into the Rio-Paris crash disputed by Air France and victims
The investigations "did not lead to characterizing a culpable failure by Airbus or Air France in connection (...) with the piloting errors (...) at the origin of the accident", they had estimated .
According to expert reports, the in-flight icing of Pitot speed probes had led to disruption of the speed measurements of the Airbus A330 and disoriented the pilots until the aircraft stalled.
Airbus and Air France were indicted in 2011 for "manslaughter".
The prosecution had requested in July 2019 the referral to the criminal court of Air France only, considering that the airline had "committed negligence and recklessness" by not providing its pilots with sufficient information on the procedure to be adopted in case of anomalies linked to the probes which allow the speed of the aircraft to be controlled, after several incidents of the same type in the previous months.