The autospy of Air France’s deadliest accident. the Rio-Paris plane crash trialwhich opens this Monday, October 10 at the Paris Criminal Court, will be a parade and a battle of experts at the helm, with videos, reproductions, diagrams… Airbus and Air France, both prosecuted for “manslaughter“, will be brought back to the causes and circumstances of the accident, which killed 216 passengers and 12 crew members on June 1, 2009 in the Atlantic Ocean.
The experts will dissect for nine weeks the trajectory of the famous flight AF447 which crashed in the middle of the night in the Atlantic Ocean, 3h45 after taking off from Rio de Janeiro. More than thirteen years after the tragedy, Airbus and Air France have deployed great means to demonstrate that they have not committed a fault, and to send it back too. At the heart of the investigation, there are also the black boxes, which were only found at 4,000 meters deep two years after the crash, in 2011.
Today, Airbus is accused of having “underestimated the dangerousness of his previous incidents” on its famous “Pitot” probes“, instruments, placed at the level of the nose of the plane, which measure the speed. During the Rio-Paris flight, they froze, causing a series of malfunctions. During the 14 months preceding the crash, there had already been 18 incidents of the same kind and Airbus would not, in short, have operated sufficient feedback to identify the origin of these breakdowns and find solutions.
For the European aircraft manufacturer, the aircraft stung due to pilot error. The pilots’ unions, who are civil parties, have planned to respond at the hearing to this reading of the events, which they believe is totally erroneous. Air France is accused of failing to train and inform pilots. They would not have had enough training exposure to the scenario they encountered that night. Hence their total loss of bearings.
Tested by thirteen years of investigation and procedure, the 489 civil parties want only one thing: to understand if what happened was foreseeable. The families thus want the responsibilities to be established and assumed, when their fear remains of seeing the trial be drowned by a succession of indigestible expertise.
“What could have happened in that cabin, the screams, that plane swooping down in a terrifying storm. What happened?”
Alain Jakubowicz, lawyer for the association Entraide et solidarité AF447France Info
LFamilies are tired but still hoping for answers. “Air France and Airbus will try to make this trial technical, but what is behind it?“, asks Alain Jakubowicz, lawyer for the association Entraide et solidarité AF447, before continuing: “There is human matter. We certainly have recordings of what happened in the cockpit, and we don’t know if we’re going to play them in court, but it’s the imagination of those families who were waiting at the airport. , who came to pick up their father, their child, their companion, who never arrived, and who, since then, have remade the film [du crash]“.
The victims on the plane were of 32 different nationalities, quite young. Among the civil parties, many elderly parents live in the provinces or abroad. Following nine weeks of hearing in Paris will be complicated for them: they regret that no web radio has been planned, as was the case for the trial of the attacks of November 13 or that of the attack in Nice.