![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/002466ad-614.jpg\"\/)
\n228 passengers and crew died when the Airbus A330 vanished in darkness during an Atlantic storm<\/p>\n
A Paris appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter over the 2009 Rio-Paris plane crash that killed 228 passengers and crew in France’s worst air disaster.<\/p>\n
Three Irish women – Jane Deasy from Co Dublin, Eithne Walls from Co Down and Aisling Butler from Co Tipperary – were among the 228 people killed in the crash on 1 June 2009.<\/p>\n
All three were doctors and were returning home from a holiday in Brazil.<\/p>\n
The verdict is the latest milestone in a legal marathon involving two of France’s most emblematic companies and relatives of the mainly French, Brazilian and German victims.<\/p>\n
Relatives of some of the 228 passengers and crew who died when the Airbus A330 vanished in darkness during an Atlantic storm gathered to hear the verdict after their 17-year legal battle to pinpoint blame for France’s worst air disaster.<\/p>\n
The court ordered the companies to pay the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter – \u20ac225,000 each, following the request of prosecutors during the eight-week trial.<\/p>\n
In 2023, a lower court had cleared the two companies, both of which have repeatedly denied the charges.<\/p>\n
The maximum fines, amounting to just a few minutes of either company’s revenue, have been widely dismissed as a token penalty. But family groups have said a conviction would represent a recognition of their plight.<\/p>\n
\n228 passengers and crew died when the Airbus A330 vanished in darkness during an Atlantic storm<\/p>\n
Further appeals seen likely<\/p>\n
French lawyers have predicted further appeals to the country’s highest court, potentially dragging the process out for years more and prolonging the ordeal for relatives.<\/p>\n
Flight AF447 vanished from radar screens on 1 June, 2009, with people from 33 nationalities on board. The black boxes were recovered two years later after a deep-sea search.<\/p>\n
In 2012, BEA crash investigators found the plane’s crew had pushed their jet into a stall, chopping lift from under the wings, after mishandling a problem to do with iced-up sensors.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors, however, focused their attention on alleged failures inside both the planemaker and airline. Those included poor training and failing to follow up on earlier incidents.<\/p>\n
To prove manslaughter, prosecutors needed not only to establish that the companies were guilty of negligence but pull the threads together to demonstrate how this caused the crash.<\/p>\n
Under the French system, last year’s appeal proceedings involved a completely new trial with evidence reviewed from scratch. Any further appeals following Thursday’s verdict will shift the focus from the AF447 cockpit to intricacies of law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Paris appeals court has found Airbus and Air France guilty of corporate manslaughter over the 2009 Rio-Paris…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460232,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-460231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}