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\nThe AF447 disaster has been among the most widely debated in aviation<\/p>\n
A French appeals court will begin a new trial of Air France and Airbus, 16 years after a jetliner plunged into the Atlantic killing all 228 people on board, including three young Irish women.<\/p>\n
Jane Deasy from Co Dublin, Eithne Walls from Co Down and Aisling Butler from Co Tipperary died in the crash on 1 June 2009.<\/p>\n
All three were doctors and were returning home from a holiday in Brazil.<\/p>\n
A lower French court cleared both Air France and Airbus of corporate manslaughter in 2023, following a historic public trial over the disappearance of flight AF447 while en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.<\/p>\n
After a two-year search for the A330’s black boxes, French investigators found pilots had mishandled the temporary loss of data from iced-up speed sensors and pushed the jet into an aerodynamic stall, or free fall, without responding to alerts.<\/p>\n
But the trial more than a decade later also shed light on discussions between Air France and Airbus about growing problems with the sensors, or “pitot probes”, that generate speed readings.<\/p>\n
Following nine weeks of evidence, a Paris judge listed four acts of negligence by Airbus and one by Air France, but found these were not enough under French criminal law to establish a definitive link to the loss of the jet during a midnight storm.<\/p>\n
The new trial is expected to stretch over two months of hearings, during which lawyers for victims’ families will try to persuade appeal judges that there was a direct link between the previously identified negligence and the crash.<\/p>\n
\nThe AF447 disaster has been among the most widely debated in aviation<\/p>\n
“It is painful for the families to reopen everything 16 years later, but it is essential to keep going and demonstrate that there was criminal culpability,” said Sebastien Busy, a lawyer for one of the main associations of victims’ relatives.<\/p>\n
“If you take one of those acts of negligence away, then the accident would never have happened,” he told Reuters.<\/p>\n
Both companies have consistently denied any criminal wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
The maximum fine for corporate manslaughter is just \u20ac225,000, but prosecutors believe a new trial will help to provide a cathartic effect for families, who protested against the earlier verdict.<\/p>\n
The AF447 disaster has been among the most widely debated in aviation and led to a number of technical and training changes.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors have argued that Airbus reacted too slowly to the rising number of speed incidents and that the airline failed to do enough to ensure pilots were adequately trained.<\/p>\n
The earlier trial exposed bitter divisions between two of France’s flagship companies over the relative roles of pilot and sensor in the country’s worst air disaster.<\/p>\n
The chief executives of Airbus and Air France, part of Franco-Dutch Air France-KLM, are expected to make statements during the opening hearing, which starts today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A French appeals court will begin a new trial of Air France and Airbus, 16 years after a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-50781","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\/50781","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=50781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}