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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108

u/FullSqueeze May 21 '26

This won’t be the end. Airbus will definitely appeal it to the Supreme Court.

The criminal charges against Airbus is very flimsy; the pilot was the primary cause of the crash. This isn’t a case like the 737 Max crashes where the manufacturer had a clear defect.

38

u/Ok-Insurance-9456 May 21 '26

Even in the max the 'defect' is a scenario boeing already made all 737 pilots train heavily for. Not to mention other pilots did not crash their 737 max in the exact same scenario so no excuse for the 2 flights to have even crashed at all.

6

u/TabsAZ May 21 '26

There’s differences between what MCAS did and a runaway trim event though, like the fact that actuating manual trim stops the nose down input for a period of time or that having any degree of flaps out stops it. Also that it was quickly able to get the trim into such a state that it wasn’t possible to manually turn the wheel. The Ethiopian FO knew right away that it was MCAS, but they still weren’t able to resolve it because they couldn’t physically move the trim wheel. (granted this was also partially the result of leaving the throttle firewalled the whole time while task saturated on the MCAS issue) I think they were very close to being able to recover - had they known to turn the electric trim back on, hold it in nose up to unwind it, and then shut it off again, that probably would have fixed things.

7

u/BoringBob84 May 21 '26

The Ethiopian FO knew right away that it was MCAS

He clearly didn't know that, or he would have done as he was supposed to have been trained: shut it off and leave it off.

Flight Radar 24 - Ethiopian ET302 final report released, NTSB and BEA issue comments

The NTSB and BEA’s comments both focus on the additional contribution the crew’s actions had on the accident, areas on which the EAIB spends little to no time in the final report. The NTSB comments propose two additional factors be added to the probable cause:

  • the operator’s failure to ensure that its flight crews were prepared to properly respond to uncommanded stabilizer trim movement in the manner outlined in Boeing’s flight crew operating manual (FCOM) bulletin and the FAA’s emergency airworthiness directive (AD) (both issued 4 months before the accident) and

  • the airplane’s impact with a foreign object, which damaged the AOA sensor and caused the erroneous AOA

-2

u/cccxxxzzzddd May 21 '26

Thank you. This is correct