AVIATION/ COURT FINDS "CRIMINAL ERROR" IN AF FL447 CRASH

A French court ruled this week that "criminal error" was behind the June 1, 2009 crash of AIR FRANCE Flight 447, an A330 on service from Rio de Janiero to Paris, opening the way for a compensation claim. A commission at a court in Toulon, southern France, ruled that it could pay compensation of 20,000 euros to the family of 1 of the Flight Attendant's. The evidence was enough to suggest that there had been a "criminal error characteristic of the offence of manslaughter", the court said. The commission judged that the guarantee funds for victims of terrorism and other offences, should pay out 10,000 euros to the brother and the same amount to the father of the victim. Flight 447 went down in the Atlantic roughly midway between Brazil and Senegal on June 1, 2009, after encountering strong thunderstorms, killing all 228 people on board in the worst crash in Air France's history. Investigators have acknowledged in previous reports that Airbus 330-200's airspeed monitors, the pitot tubes, were faulty, but maintain this could not have been the sole cause of the disaster. The weather is a considered to at least played a major role in the crash. Recent reports suggest that although AF447 flew right into the storms, the Pilots may not have been aware of the storms, or if they were aware, the severity of the storms. The investigation, which is still ongoing, has been hampered by the inability to find the black boxes and the bulk of the wreckage. A series of ACARS messages were emitted by the onboard flight computer shortly before the plane disappeared from radar, which show multiple systems failing. This may have aided the court in coming to its conclusion. Until now, the French justice system did not recognize that the failure behind the crash could be down to criminal error. (SK COMMENT: Its interesting to see a court come to a conclusion on an investigation that is still ongoing, with no Probable Cause of the crash yet established. While many aviation experts believe we will never know what took place onboard Flight 447 on the night it crashed, they still believe that the Final Report into the crash should be released, before courts begin to assign blame. Others point out that the culture within Air France may have indirectly led to the crash, thus saying that this court decision may be correct. To draw your own conclusions, they suggest reading the investigation report into the 2000 crash of the Concorde, Air France Flight 4590).