Airbus and Air France have been found guilty of corporate manslaughter by a Paris appeals court over the 2009 Rio-Paris plane crash that killed 228 passengers and crew, three years after being acquitted in a lower court.<\/p>\n
“Justice has absolutely been done,” Daniele Lamy, president of the AF447 victims’ association, who lost her son in the accident, said outside the courtroom.<\/p>\n
Relatives of some of those who died when the Airbus A330 vanished in darkness and plunged into the Atlantic during a storm listened to the verdict in silence after a 17-year legal battle over responsibility for France’s worst air disaster. A lower court had in 2023 cleared the two French companies, both of which have\u00a0repeatedly denied the charges<\/a>.<\/p>\n Thursday’s verdict is the latest milestone in a legal marathon involving relatives of the mainly French, Brazilian and German victims and two of France’s most emblematic companies. The appeals court ordered them both to pay the maximum fine for corporate manslaughter, \u20ac225,000(NZ$445,195), following the request of prosecutors during last year’s eight-week trial.<\/p>\n The 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 formal recognition of their plight.<\/p>\n Airbus said it would appeal to France’s highest court to address legal matters raised by the trial.<\/p>\n But Lamy urged the planemaker and Air France not to take the case any further.<\/p>\n “There is no human, moral or legal justification in continuing this procedure,” she told reporters.<\/p>\nOrdeal for relatives of victims<\/h3>\n