French justice condemns the airline and the European manufacturer for involuntary manslaughter in the investigation that the accident was caused by a plane malfunction
Thirteen years after the accident of Air France Flight 447, which killed 228 people on the journey from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, it is time for justice. The airline and European airline manufacturer Airbus, accused of “involuntary manslaughter”, will sit on the defendant’s couch from Monday to December 8. If found guilty, they could face a fine of up to €225,000, money equivalent to just two minutes of income for Airbus or five minutes of airline tickets.
The trial was about not to be detained. In 2019, the investigating judges ordered the closure of the investigations and the filing of the case, as the accident was due to pilot error. This sparked outrage among the relatives of the victims, who appealed to the Court of Appeal. This body ordered in May 2021 that the two companies should be tried for the deaths of 216 passengers of 33 different nationalities and 12 crew members in the accident with the highest number of deaths in the history of the major French airline.
After this thirteen-year legal battle, the relatives of the victims hope that it will be “the trial of Airbus and Air France” and not “that of the pilots”, said Daniel Lamy, president of the family association Entraide et Solidarité AF447 (Mutual Aid and solidarity AF447). “We rely on an impartial, exemplary process so that this does not happen again and that through this process the two defendants are putting aviation safety at the center of their concerns and not just profitability,” Lamy added in statements to the agency. from AFP press.
On June 1, 2009, Flight AF447’s plane crashed into the mid-Atlantic and plunged into the sea due to ice blocking the device’s speed-measuring probes, experts said. As a result, the pilots were unable to properly control the aircraft, which sank in less than five minutes in international waters.
A few days after the incident, the French and Brazilian navies recovered about 50 bodies. But the device was not found until almost two years later, in April 2011, at a depth of 3,900 meters. After the discovery of the plane, another 104 bodies were recovered.
The black boxes confirmed that the pilots, disoriented at night and in the middle of a storm due to a technical failure of the device, were unable to prevent the device from falling into the sea.
Former French counter-terrorism prosecutor François Molins spoke on Monday about the delicate issue of organ removal during the autopsy of several victims of the July 14, 2016 attack in Nice, acknowledging that “not all of them were justified”. “If it had to be repeated, there would have been no systematic extractions,” Molins said before the Paris court, where the accomplices of the perpetrator of the attack are being tried.
After the attack in Nice, autopsies were performed on 14 of the 86 victims, including four children, without their relatives being informed or consenting. In total, 173 organs were removed from 14 victims at the request of the Paris prosecutor’s office. Several victims were buried without their organs. Associations of relatives of victims do not consider these removals necessary.
Source: La Verdad
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