the trial of the Rio-Paris disaster will open Monday, October 10 for nine weeks

The photos of his brother never leave him. Philippe Linguet has been waging a real legal battle for 13 years. From Monday October 10, Air France and Airbus will be on the bench of the defendants. This will be the ultimate opportunity to know the circumstances of the Rio-Paris crash. “They have to hear that there is for us, families of victims, one before June 1, 2009, and one after June 1, 2009. We are no longer the same today as yesterday”, he confides. On June 1, 2009, flight AF447 bound for Paris took off from Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). Around 2 o’clock in the morning, the aircraft crossed a storm, and a freezing atmosphere. Ice has formed on the Pitot probes, a tool that allows pilots to to know the speed of the plane.

From that moment, the information in the cockpit became erroneous. The pilots multiplied the maneuvers. The plane then stalled. “The pilots reacted with the tools available to them at that time, with the procedures available to them, with the training they had received, with a situation which is still extremely unlikely, which is to meet at night , in turbulence, and with complete airspeed indication failure”, comments Yves Deshayes, president of the national union of airline pilots (SNPL). The plane crashed into the sea, killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew members. The trial must in particular determine what were the technical failures, and whether the pilots were sufficiently trained. It should last nine weeks.