For three weeks, engineers and aeronautical leaders tried to clarify the causes of the 2009 accident. The defense of Airbus and Air France highlights the failures of the pilots. That of the civil parties, business responsibility.
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It is a parade of men in strict costumes and with a police verb. At the helm of the Rio-Paris flight crash trial, fifteen experts in turn profiled, for three weeks, their aeronautical science. From rivers hearings, to assumed technicality, where these pilots, engineers and managers – often retired – have made the exegesis of the security procedures in force at 1 er June 2009, during night d ‘Storm where flight AF447 was damaged in the Atlantic Ocean, off Brazil, making 228 victims.
At pedagogy purposes, a model of the Airbus A330-200 was first arranged in the courtroom of the Paris court, where Airbus and Air France are accused of “manslaughter”, after A decade of chaotic education. Then, on a giant screen, were projected extracts from abstruse analysis reports, relating in particular to the fringe of Pitot probes, the primary cause of the loss of anemometric benchmarks, having resulted in the crash.
Another graphic, where two colored curves intertwine, caught the attention of the room: the first figure the restoration of a plane scrupulously following the standard procedure for the catch -up of a dropout; The other, climbing towards the top of the screen and plunging towards the floor, testifies to the violent trajectory of the Airbus A330-200 during the last four minutes of his flight. Air France and Airbus are suspected of having underestimated the danger of Pitot probes, as much as having neglected the training and information of the crews.
The depositions of experts and witnesses from airline security agencies (General Directorate of Civil Aviation and European Agence for Aviation Security, in particular) have hardly brought new elements. But they act as a revealing of the defense strategy, attached to the three pilots the responsibility of the crash. They also serve as support, conversely, to the recriminations of the civil parties, convinced that fundamental negligence has been committed upstream of the takeoff of AF447.
“The effect of surprise”
It is in the cockpit of this Rio-Paris flight, where the drama was established, that the debates first interfere during the audiences. In particular about the “incomprehensible” reaction, according to the term of several stakeholders, of the pilot pulling tirelessly on the handle until fatal dropping.
“The first thing to do is to maintain the trajectory”, professes a former experienced pilot, ensuring that “the crew was trained in the IAS [Indicated Air Speed, that is the speed measured by the probes] doubts “. To hear it, the B.A.-Ba of the piloting instructions would have been forgotten during the passage in manual piloting. “When we have a doubt, we apply the procedure,” insists Simon Ndiaye, one of Airbus’s lawyers, so far more sokaceous than their Air France table neighbors.
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