At the start of the sixth week of the trial of the worst French air disaster, the crash of the Rio-Paris flight, Airbus takes the place of Air France at the helm, Monday, November 14, for two days of interrogations. The two companies are tried for manslaughter at the Paris Criminal Court. Two hundred and twenty-eight people died in the crash in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009. Since Monday afternoon, the aircraft manufacturer’s representative has been dealing, as best they can, with questions from the judges.
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For more than four hours, Christophe Cail, 61-year-old chief test pilot at Airbus, answers questions, straight as an i in his impeccable suit. From the start of the interrogation, in a monotonous voice, he claims to have put security at the forefront of his career. This ultra-experienced former fighter pilot wants to show how the crew of the Rio-Paris flight made a series of mistakes before crashing the plane into the ocean.
But in front of many relatives of victims who came to listen to his explanations, the audience rocked. The judge continues her questions on the speed sensors at the origin of the accident. The Airbus representative loses ground: “I am not an expert“, “I don’t know how to tell you”, such are his answers each time. The questions are however essential: why Airbus did not replace the speed probes while the incidents before the crash multiplied? Could corrosion have rendered these Pitot probes unusable? Is it for cost reasons that they have not been changed? “On security issues, a trade deal can never stand“, he replies.
So why not have applied a precautionary principle when the companies warned Airbus that at high altitude frost can put these probes out of order? “Air France did not follow up, we questioned Thales”. Regularly, he kicks into touch. So does Christophe Cail manage to convince the court? Nothing less sure. “We are still a little hungry”launches the judge.
The Airbus representative is then questioned about the behavior of the crew, solely responsible for the crash according to the aircraft manufacturer. Facing the court, Christophe Cail is hardly more comfortable. However, piloting is his domain, which is why Airbus has chosen him as its legal representative. But there again, in a very technical piloting lesson, his explanations are confused. The basic rule, he recalls, is that the crew must apply the procedures. Pilots must be kept from thinking. According to him, the pilots thought too much that night of June 1, 2009. Why did the crew not respect the procedures? It remains mysterious.
“Two hundred and twenty-eight dead!”, launches annoyed a relative of the victims from the bench of the civil parties. The civil parties who will not fail to drive the point home on Tuesday, when they will be able to question this representative of Airbus. We will then also see if Air France’s lawyers prefer to respect a form of “non-aggression pact” denounced by the families. A pact which consists in throwing no spades, nothing that can destabilize the other in his defense. A pact that Airbus respected last week during the interrogation of Air France. The questions from the aircraft manufacturer’s lawyers then barely lasted two minutes.