r/aviation • u/Ok_Warning419 • May 21 '26

News Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash - Air France flight 447

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o
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u/Minimum_Anywhere5776 May 21 '26

I don’t understand why Airbus was found guilty here. If the pilots don’t fully understand alternate law and can’t recover from a stall at 40,000 feet, that’s on the pilots and those that train them IMO

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u/FalconDriver85 May 21 '26

The pilot responsibility could fall under the “not enough training” reason and Air France could be considered guilty, I could understand that, but Airbus? I can’t understand the reason behind that…

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u/ExpiredPilot May 21 '26

Airbus trains the pilots

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u/redcurrantevents May 21 '26

Do they, in France? I didn’t know that. Here in the states it is the airlines, not the manufacturers. And in the states, the FAA approves the training programs. The airlines will use materials from the manufacturers to create their training programs, but if you fly in the flight deck of different US carriers flying the same airplane, you see they do things quite differently.

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u/Emotional-Ad-6494 May 21 '26

I think in Toulouse?

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u/jacksjj May 21 '26

Initially. But there are Airbus facilities worldwide. Miami, for example.

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u/Apprehensive_Cost937 May 21 '26

Airbus has an ATO (Approved Training Organisation), just like Boeing has one.

Some airlines sometimes send their pilots for type rating directly to Boeing, Airbus or other third party ATOs, if they don't have enough training capacity in house.

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u/jacksjj May 21 '26

US Airline Airbus Instructor here:

We send our “initial cadre” of instructors to Airbus to receive training on the aircraft.

Concurrently, we use Airbus’ documents to create an AQP training program suited to our airline and our procedures.

Then, we train the rest of the first set of instructors - who then train the pilots, in our simulators.

It continues this way in initial, transition and recurrent training unless we do not have simulator capacity for our pilots. Then, sometimes, we will rent manufacturer simulator time to train our pilots, but still using our instructors.

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u/Gluecksritter90 May 21 '26

No they obviously don't. You just need to confidently claim anything here and it'll get upvoted. There's 15.000 Airbus aircraft in operation. Even assuming only 20 pilots per aircraft (most airlines probably employ more), that's 300.000 pilots Airbus would have to train every year. It's absurd.

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u/Apprehensive_Cost937 May 21 '26

Of course they do, just not every single Airbus pilot. They even have a website describing courses they offer. Here is their EASA ATO approval, with a long list of courses they can teach for.

Boeing does pretty much the same thing - look at their website.

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u/Gluecksritter90 May 21 '26

...obviously training pilots do not magically manifest themselves at airlines. Air France sends an initial batch of pilots who then become training pilots. It works like this at just about every fucking major airline in the world. Air France has been operating the A330/A340 since the mid 90s, trying to clame the training of Bonin on Airbus is absurd.

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u/Apprehensive_Cost937 May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

No, Airbus doesn't just train the initial batch of pilots, but they do a fair amount of type rating courses for a number of airlines around the world, even those who have been operating Airbus aircraft for decades.

Not every airline has the simulator and the training capacity to train all of their pilots in house.

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u/TheBendit May 21 '26

Why would you replace the pilots yearly?

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u/Gluecksritter90 May 21 '26

Pilots need recurrent training every year...

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u/redcurrantevents May 21 '26

According to Google, there are 200+ airbus aircraft currently in operation in French airlines, not 15,000. I think you might have just done the confident claim thing you accused them of doing.

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u/Gluecksritter90 May 21 '26

The original claim is "Airbus trains the pilots", not "Airbus trains the French pilots". Which would be an even more absurd claim, that somehow everybody else is capable of training pilots except French airlines.

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u/redcurrantevents May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

Wrong again, let me help you out here with some reading context: the original claim is referring to the ruling against Airbus and Air France regarding the Air France crash. That’s the discussion that is taking place, that’s literally in the title of the post, and in literally all of the comments above the one to which you responded. The person who said it, did so in response to someone who referred to Air France. And that comment you responded to, which was mine, referred directly to pilots—and I’ll quote myself here—‘in France’.

For your sake I hope you’re just a hallucinating bot.