Air France and Airbus were acquitted on Monday over the 2009 crash of a Rio-Paris flight after a French court ruled their errors could not be proven to be the cause of the disaster.
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While the ruling was expected after prosecutors recommended to the Paris court not to seek a conviction, it was still a huge blow for families of victims who have waged a 14-year campaign for justice.
The two France-based companies went on trial in October to determine their responsibility for the worst aviation disaster in Air France's history, which left all 228 people on board flight AF447 dead.
Prosecutors said as hearings in the eight-week trial wound up in December it was "impossible" to convict the two aviation giants, which were charged with involuntary manslaughter but denied the charges.
The hearings in Paris centred on the role of defective so-called Pitot tubes, which are used to measure the flight speed of aircraft.
The court heard how a malfunction with the tubes, which became blocked with ice crystals during a mid-Atlantic storm, caused alarms to sound in the cockpit of the Airbus A330 and the autopilot system to switch off.
Technical experts highlighted how, after the instrument failure, the pilots put the plane into a climb that caused the aircraft to lose upward lift from the air moving under its wings, thus losing altitude.
Air France and Airbus blamed pilot error as the main cause of the crash.
But lawyers for the families argued that both companies were aware of the Pitot tube problem before the crash, and that the pilots were not trained to deal with such a high-altitude emergency.
The court said Airbus committed "four acts of imprudence or negligence", including not replacing certain models of the Pitot tubes that seemed to freeze more often on its A330-A340 fleet, and "withholding information" from flight operators.
It said Air France had committed two "acts of imprudence" in the way it disseminated an information note on the faulty tubes to its pilots.
But there was not a strong enough causal link between these failings and the accident to show an offence had been committed. ■