bad luck
Verdict on death flight Rio-Paris: survivors pessimistic
Bernd Gans lost his daughter in the crash. photo
© Rachel Bossmeyer/dpa
When an Air France plane crashed between Rio and Paris, Bernd Gans lost his daughter Ines. Almost 14 years later, the airline was judged in Paris. Gans doesn’t expect much from it.
The bereaved Bernd Gans from Vaterstetten, Bavaria, is pessimistic about the verdict in the trial surrounding the Rio-Paris death flight on Monday in Paris. “I have to assume that the whole strategy will work for you,” he told the German Press Agency about the accused Airbus and Air France companies. The companies have to answer for the crash of an Air France plane almost 14 years ago with 228 deaths on suspicion of negligent homicide. They denied responsibility and demanded acquittal.
The Air France flight AF 447 disappeared from radar screens on June 1, 2009 en route from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the French capital. The Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic, killing 228 people. The cause was unclear for a long time. It was not until May 2011 that the last bodies and the flight data recorder were recovered from a depth of around 4,000 meters. 28 Germans were among the victims of the accident flight. One of them was Gans’ then 31-year-old daughter Ines.
The Paris trial followed years of legal wrangling. In 2019, investigating judges dismissed a case. The crash was due to a combination of elements that had never happened before. In 2021, an appeals court decided otherwise and ordered the trial of Airbus and Air France.
Air France was accused in the proceedings of not having adequately trained the pilots. According to the indictment, Airbus is said to have underestimated the consequences of a failure of the probes for speed measurement. But in their closing arguments, a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office said they found it impossible to prove the companies were at fault. You can’t ask for a conviction.
For Gans, who is chairman of the German bereaved association HIOP AF447 and one of around 500 joint plaintiffs in the proceedings, this came as a great surprise. He called the plea one-sided. He now does not expect that the corporations will actually be sentenced on Monday. Regardless of the verdict, Gans said of the process: “Overall, it was incredibly important.”