Crash of the Rio-Paris: the report that targets Airbus

Ten years after the crash of flight Rio-Paris AF447, which caused the death of 228 people on June 1, 2009, the investigating judges of the cluster collective accidents of the Paris court must soon make their decision. We will then know the fate of Air France and Airbus, indicted for involuntary homicides since 2011 in this case. The airline and the manufacturer of the A330, or one and not the other, could be returned to the criminal court or be dismissed.

In mid-July, to the chagrin of the families of the victims, the Paris prosecutor's office had requested the referral of Air France and a dismissal for Airbus, considering that "no criminal fault causally linked to the accident can be imputed to the manufacturer ". To its comments in response, the Association Entraide et Solidarité AF447 has attached an unpublished document on the Pitot Thalès AA probes, which proves to her that the manufacturer could not ignore the failures.

These are nickel tubes "big as the hand" who played a key role in the crash of Rio-Paris. By causing erroneous speed indications, the simultaneous icing of the three Pitot probes of the Airbus A330 is undoubtedly the starting point for the A330 airbus stall. "It is the original cause of the accident," says Sébastien Busy, lawyer of the association of the families of the victims Entraide and Solidarity AF447, who is surprised, in his observations to the judges, that the indictment of the prosecutor "rule in five lines hardly this fundamental question ". "If this defect had been corrected in time, the accident would not have occurred," says also the former driver Gérard Arnoux, who has just published a book investigating the disaster.

"This is our last cartridge"

Created in the wake of the tragedy, civil party in the case, Mutual Aid and Solidarity AF447 is not resigned to the idea that only the pilots or the company Air France, if it was ultimately returned to the Criminal Court, are designated as responsible for the drama. Before the decision of the examining magistrates intervened, she took out of her drawers a document proving, according to her, that Airbus "was fully aware" of the failures of these probes manufactured by the equipment manufacturer Thalès. "This is our last cartridge," says its president, Danièle Lamy. "We kept this card for the trial," says his son Laurent Lamy, computer scientist, very involved in the informal committee of experts who welded around the association.

Dated November 2004, entitled "expertise of a Pitot probe", this document developed for Thales was sent to them by an anonymous source two years ago. It details on 36 pages the results of the comparative study of the aging of two probes having "about 10,000 hours of flight". One, very degraded, is a Pitot AA (Thales) which has a strong corrosion; the other a Pitot Goodrich (manufactured by Aerospace), little degraded. "This report, of which Airbus probably has knowledge, shows that Thales knew that its probe was almost HS after 10,000 hours of flight, analyzes Laurent Lamy. Corrosion of the tubes made the heating system inefficient. But the AF447's probes totaled nearly 19,000 flight hours! Almost the double … "

"Judicial debate without Airbus would be a truncated debate"

The year before the crash had seen an upsurge in incidents of high altitude Pitot probes icing: eleven in 2008, including eight at Air France. "What the victims' families do not understand is why Airbus, who was aware of these incidents, made sure that EASA (Editor's note: European Aviation Safety Agency, the supervisory authority) does not issue a safety directive to ban the Pitot AA before the accident, "insists Laurent Lamy. For these civil parties, the manufacturer therefore underestimated their dangerousness and wrongly maintained an unsuitable classification in the scale of risks – with the consequences that this entailed on the training and the information of the crews.

"Airbus claimed that high altitude stall training was not necessary on this type of aircraft," says Gérard Arnoux. Ad hoc emergency maneuvers did not exist. For the families, the lack of information to the crews concerning the icing of the altitude probes having contributed to the effect of surprise of the pilots, sufficient in the eyes of the parquet floor to justify the dismissal of Air France, should be also for Airbus. "A judicial debate without Airbus would be a truncated debate," insists the association.

Most recently, relatives of families have also searched in vain in the court file the trace of the famous probes. "They do not appear anywhere, surprised Danièle Lamy. We are still waiting to know if they were reassembled during the research at sea and analyzed. She wondered in these terms: "The murder weapon would have disappeared? Air France had reacted to the prosecution's demands by announcing that it was maintaining its demand for dismissal. Solicited, the lawyers of Airbus did not follow up.