UNITED KINGDOM PERSPECTIVE

London, 21 May 2026. The Paris Court of Appeal declared Air France and Airbus guilty of involuntary manslaughter for the crash of flight AF447, which occurred on 1 June 2009 over the Atlantic. The 228 people on board — 216 passengers and 12 crew members — all perished in what remains to this day the worst aviation accident in French history. The decision, made on Wednesday after eight weeks of appeal hearings, reverses the acquittal pronounced in April 2023 by a correctional court.

The two companies were condemned to pay each 225,000 euros, the maximum fine provided for by French law. For the BBC and The Independent, this amount — equivalent to a few minutes of each group's revenue — is presented as a sanction essentially symbolic. Relatives of the victims, present at the hearing to hear the verdict, publicly described this amount as 'derisory'. Several family organizations had insisted that a conviction, even with a modest fine, would represent an official recognition of their suffering and the responsibility of the companies.

The crash of flight AF447, which disappeared from radar during an Atlantic storm on the night of 31 May to 1 June 2009, required one of the most complex search operations in aviation history. The wreckage was located at the bottom of the Atlantic after a search of over 10,000 km², and the black boxes were not recovered until 2011, two years after the disaster. Of the 51 bodies found during the first 26 days of the search, many were still strapped to their seats. A witness interviewed by the BBC in 2019 had confided that he had not been able to bury the remains of his son for more than two years after the fact.

The technical investigation concluded that a combination of failures was responsible: frozen Pitot tube anemometers, an inadequate reaction by the pilots to the loss of speed indications, and a stall at 11,580 meters altitude. The Airbus A330 had plunged into the sea in a spiral uncontrolled for three and a half minutes before crashing. Before the Court of Appeal, the prosecutors had focused their requisitions on the internal shortcomings of the two companies: insufficient training of the crews, lack of follow-up on previous incidents similar to this one. To establish the penal fault, they had to demonstrate not only a characterized negligence, but also the direct causal link between these shortcomings and the disaster — which the correctional court had refused to admit in 2023.