A Paris appeals court on Wednesday found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter over the 2009 Rio-Paris crash, a ruling that follows a 17-year legal battle over one of France's worst aviation disasters. The court ordered both companies to pay a maximum fine of €225,000 each.
Relatives of the passengers and crew who died in the crash gathered to hear the verdict as the appeals judges brought down a decision many families had waited years to hear. Flight AF447 vanished from radar screens on June 1, 2009, while crossing the Atlantic in a storm, killing 228 passengers and crew from 33 nationalities.
The case moved through an eight-week trial after prosecutors argued that failures inside both the planemaker and the airline helped set the disaster in motion, including poor training and a failure to follow up on earlier incidents. A lower court cleared Airbus and Air France in 2023, but the appeals ruling reversed that outcome.
Investigators later found in 2012 that the plane's crew had pushed the jet into a stall after mishandling a problem with iced-up sensors, and the black boxes were recovered two years after the crash in a deep-sea search. That evidence has long framed the crash as a chain of errors rather than a single mechanical failure, and Wednesday's ruling leaves the two companies branded by criminal responsibility even as the financial penalty remains modest for firms of their size.
The verdict matters because family groups had said a conviction would amount to recognition of their loss after years of hearings, expert reports and legal setbacks. For the relatives who came to the courthouse, the case was never only about money; it was about whether anyone at the top of two of France's biggest companies would be held accountable for the deadliest outcome of Flight AF447.
