Airbus and Air France have been found guilty of corporate manslaughter nearly two decades after a crash that killed three doctors from Ireland.
228 people were killed on the Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Paris, France on June 1, 2009 — the worst air disaster in French history.
Three Irish women — Jane Deasy from Co Dublin, Aisling Butler from Co Tipperary, and Eithne Walls from Co Down — were among the dead. The three women, all of whom were doctors, were returning from a holiday in Brazil to Ireland.
It was understood that the airline crashed during a storm over the Atlantic Ocean, with inconsistencies between airspeed measurements caused a stall that ultimately led to the airplane plunging into the ocean.
Airbus, which manufactured the A330 plane involved in the crash, and Air France have since been found guilty of manslaughter by a French appeals court, with both companies having been cleared back in 2023.
The court has ordered both companies to pay the maximum €225,000 per life lost — approximately a few minutes of each company’s revenue.
Despite the fines being dismissed as a token penalty, the families of the mainly French, Brazilian and German victims have welcomed the conviction, saying that it recognises their 17-year legal journey.
French lawyers, however, have predicted that Airbus and Air France will issue further appeals to France’s higher courts, potentially dragging out the legal case even further.
The crash occurred on June 1, 2009, with 228 people from 33 different countries on board. Several searches saw the airplane’s black boxes recovered two years after the crash on the ocean bed.
A 2012 investigation found that the plane’s crew pushed the jet into a stall, incorrectly reacting to temporary inconsistencies of airspeed measurements which likely resulted from ice crystals in sensors.
Prosecutors for the victims’ families focused on Air France and Airbus’s alleged failures, however, including poor training and failing to follow up on similar incidents that occurred earlier.
