DEATH PLUNGE TRIAL
Air France AF447 verdict: Airline and Airbus ACQUITTED over plane disaster that killed 228 after plunging into Atlantic
AIR France and Airbus have been cleared of manslaughter over a crash that killed all 228 passengers on board in the worst plane tragedy in French history.
A catastrophic chain of events saw the doomed passenger jet plummet into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009.
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Flight AF447 was en route from Rio to Paris when three Air France pilots panicked and failed to deal with malfunctioning equipment on the Airbus 330 during a storm.
Families and friends of the victims, including five Brits, have pursued a fight for justice for almost 14 years.
Many of them were infuriated by the 'not guilty' pleas by the two companies involved at the start of their two-month criminal trial.
And today sobs broke out among victims' families in the courtroom as the judges read out the decision to acquit both Airbus and Air France.
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Both faced potential fines of up to €225,000 (£200k) if convicted in France's first ever trial for corporate involuntary manslaughter.
But the judge said corporate guilt was "impossible to demonstrate" because investigators did not establish "a culpable breach by Airbus or Air France in connection with the piloting faults at the origin of the accident".
The ruling effectively means that the pilots - Marc Dubois, 58, David Robert, 37, and Pierre-Cedric Bonin, 32 - were fully responsible.
During the investigation, it emerged that two of them fell asleep, one after the other, when they were supposed to be piloting the plane.
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It was revealed that Dubois' tiredness was likely related to him being up all night the night before with his lover - an off-duty hostess and opera singer, who died on the plane.
The "piloting culture within Air France" is now said to have been reformed, according to company sources.
At the start of the court case, the names of all 228 people who died on board appeared on a screen while they were read out one by one.
Among those killed was Graham Gardner, a 52-year-old oil worker from Gourock, in Renfrewshire, and Arthur Coakley, 61, an engineer from Whitby in North Yorkshire.
Alexander Bjoroy, an 11-year-old boarder at Clifton College in Bristol, also died, as did PR executive Neil Warrior, 48.
Other victims included three young Irish doctors, returning from a two-week holiday in Brazil.
Eithne Walls, 29, from County Down, had been working at the Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin and was on a trip with Aisling Butler, 26, and Jane Deasy, 27.
All had been friends since they were students at Trinity College Dublin.
Families representing all of the 33 nationalities onboard, who were previously compensated by Air France, crowded into the Paris Criminal Court room.
Prosecutors laid the responsibility primarily with the pilots, who died in the crash.
Airbus lawyers also blamed pilot error, and Air France said the full reasons for the crash will never be known.
The official investigation found that multiple factors contributed to the crash, including pilot error and the icing over of external sensors called pitot tubes.
Sebastien Busy, a barrister representing victims’ families, said: “It's a trial where the victims must remain at the centre of debate.
"We don't want Airbus or Air France to turn this trial into a conference of engineers.”
Both companies faced trial for "involuntary manslaughter", but there were no actual people in the dock – only the companies.
Prosecutors accused Air France of failing to provide sufficient training in how pilots should react in case of malfunction of the Pitot tubes, which monitor speed.
The pilots provably reacted incorrectly when the plane stalled after the speed sensors froze over.
France’s BEA crash investigation agency said in a detailed chronology of the crash that commands from the controls of the 32-year-old junior pilot on board had pulled the nose up as the aircraft became unstable and generated an audible stall warning.
This action went against the normal procedures which call for the nose to be lowered in response to an alert that the plane was about to lose lift or, in technical parlance, "stall".
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Passengers had boarded the ill-fated Airbus A330-203 in Rio de Janeiro to head to Paris in the early hours of the morning - but it disappeared without authorities being alerted.
Days later debris from the AirFrance plane was found floating in the water, sparking a £27million two-year search of the depths of the sea.
The missing key to unlock what exactly had unfolded in the cockpit - the black box flight data and voice recorders - had sunk 12,000ft below the surface.
Its discovery turned out to be the most decisive step in the investigation led by French authorities into the deaths of 216 passengers, 12 crew members and three pilots.
Harrowing flight recordings revealed the final frantic moments of the captain Marc Dubois and two co-pilots David Robert and Pierre-Cédric Bonin as they realised their fate.
A brief interruption in their airspeed indications - lasting less than a minute - had bizarrely paralysed the trio who had more than 20,000 hours of flying experience between them.
"We've lost our speeds," one co-pilot cried, before other indicators mistakenly suggested the aircraft was losing altitude.
"I don’t know what’s happening," another added as the cockpit screens were lit up by a series of alarm messages.
The plane’s speed sensors – known as pitot tubes – were said to have iced up as the storm battered the AirFrance flight.
Each pitot tube measures the pressure of the oncoming air, which is then compared to the static pressure to derive the plane’s airspeed.
It triggered a catastrophic chain of events that left the bodies of the 216 passengers and 12 crew members floating in the icy waters.
The autopilot was disabled while the men in the cockpit were left deciphering a string of confusing speed and altitude information.
They resumed manual piloting unknowingly following the incorrect navigation data, while being pounded by turbulence.
The pilots mistakenly pointed the nose of the plane upwards when it entered an aerodynamic stall - instead of downwards.
The 205-tonne jet was then in freefall, plummeting 11,500metres from the sky in just four minutes and 24 seconds.
Warning sounds alerting the three crew members to the issue sounded 75 times as they tumbled towards the Atlantic Ocean.
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Questions of blame quickly began to swirl, with the world left baffled as to how the Airbus A330, with an impeccable safety record and no record of fatal accidents in passenger service, had plummeted.
The horrifying incident led to lasting changes in aircraft safety measures.
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