By Benjamin Katz
Airbus and Air France have been found guilty of the involuntary manslaughter of 228 passengers and crew, 17 years after what remains the worst aviation disaster in France's history.
A Paris appeals court on Thursday ordered each company to pay a 225,000 euros ($260,600) fine for every person who died onboard flight AF447 in 2009. The penalty is the maximum for corporate manslaughter in France and the combined total amounts to about $120 million.
The court sided with the public prosecution, which had argued that negligence by the plane maker and the airline "had undeniably contributed" to the crash.
The ruling is the latest twist in a long-running legal saga that began in March 2011, when criminal charges were filed against Airbus and Air France. After multiple hearings and appeals, a full retrial was held late last year, leading to Thursday's ruling.
Air France didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Airbus said it would file an appeal with France's Court of Cassation -- its highest court -- citing earlier rulings that acquitted it of guilt.
"From the outset, Airbus has pursued a constant objective: to understand the facts, to seek the truth, to draw all necessary lessons, and to act responsibly to continue improving aviation safety," the company said in a statement.
The verdict marks a rare instance of an airline or plane maker being found criminally liable after a fatal aircraft crash.
By contrast, the U.S. Department of Justice last year struck a deal to spare Boeing from a felony conviction after the manufacturer pleaded guilty to having deceived air-safety regulators about a flawed flight control system on the 737 MAX jet. The flaw caused two separate planes to take fatal nosedives leading to the deaths of 346 people.
In the case of AF447, the French court found that Airbus had long known that a critical airspeed sensor on the A330 jet was prone to freezing, and had underestimated the risk that it posed. Air France was found guilty for failing to provide sufficient safety training for pilots.
The aircraft, an Airbus A330 wide-body, had been en route from Brazil to Paris when the jet's Pitot tube, which is used to determine airspeed, iced over. Facing repeated stall warnings and wildly fluctuating airspeed readings, the pilots responded by pulling up the nose of the plane, causing its speed to drop and the aircraft to stall, French accident investigators found.
The pilots then failed to recover control of the plane. The wide-body plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew. It took almost two years and multiple search campaigns to find the wreckage and the plane's black box recorders.
The crash ultimately spurred airlines to upgrade training procedures to help pilots better and more quickly react to incidents at higher altitudes, a less common phase of flight for an accident to occur.
Write to Benjamin Katz at ben.katz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 21, 2026 11:46 ET (15:46 GMT)
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