Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o

by baal80spam • 2 months ago

135 132 2 months ago

abrowne• 2 months ago

Hearing this in the news reminded me of William Langewiesche's great piece in vanity fair about the cause: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

twoodfin• 2 months ago

That piece is an insightful pairing with season 2 of HBO’s “The Rehearsal”.

jbverschoor2• 2 months ago

Stark contrast between Boeing (US) never been guilty of anything vs Airbus (EU)

readthenotes1• 2 months ago

They have, just not criminal penalties. No one will go to prison. The nearly $19 billion in losses to the value in Boeing is chump change ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_groundings

dcrazy7• 2 months ago

Boeing literally pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges. https://apnews.com/article/boeing-guilty-plea-fraud-justice-...

jbverschoor2• 2 months ago

Manslaughter for not having enough training during a specific malfunction, one crash

Fraud for two crashes caused by knowingly having unsafe planes (and two whistleblowers conveniently die)

y1n0• 2 months ago

Not so stark when you realize that both airbus and air france were acquitted years ago. And then the prosecutors appealed! I find that terrifying.

dcrazy7• 2 months ago

Terrifying that they were acquitted, or that double jeopardy is legal in France?

burnt-resistor• 2 months ago

What portion of blame does the pilot who yanks back on and holds the side stick without understanding the situation deserve? This is flying 101.

How poorly trained in basic airmanship were they and how were they allowed to be pilots? That's the blame component for AF.

wolvoleo5• 2 months ago

It is indeed very sad that all they had to do is let go of that stick for a moment.

dcrazy7• 2 months ago

Are you type rated on any Airbus models?

arcfour4• 2 months ago

Do you need to be to understand that nose up is not how to recover from a stall?

gambiting2• 2 months ago

Like someone else said - there doesn't exist any situation, in any plane in any conditions, where holding the stick back the entire time would be an appropriate input. Literally doesn't exist. So if you're doing that.....what exactly are you hoping to achieve? Is a fundamental lack of understanding of how planes work.

frou_dh• 2 months ago

IIRC it seemed like that pilot was having some kind of nervous breakdown because he surreptitiously held back on the stick all the way from 38,000ft until the crash.

Mawr2• 2 months ago

If you want to have something or someone to blame then all of it. However, you want future flights to become safer, then none. Make your pick.

Your response is very human, but also deeply irrational. In practical terms of safety it is irrelevant if the pilot is to blame or not or to what degree.

All we should want to do is analyze the reasons why the crash happened and adjust the aviation safety system such that it never happens again.

If pilot actions contributed, then we must ask why and how exactly, then fix those factors through better airplane design and pilot training.

Just blaming someone, then moving on may make you feel good inside, but does nothing to improve safety.

This is flying 101.
How poorly trained in basic airmanship were they and how were they allowed to be pilots?

Thoughts like these about three experienced professional pilots should make you do at least a double take. It is far more likely that you're dead wrong than that those pilots were so incompetent they didn't even know the basics.

wolvoleo5• 2 months ago

Hmm I don't think it's as black and white as just blaming airbus. The pilots literally flew a perfectly flying plane straight into the ocean. And they had plenty of time to understand what was going on. But they didn't. They didn't willingly do it and the system misguided them but that wasn't the only factor.

I agree airbus shares the blame but it's not the only one. The pilots should have realised the situation they were in, their training should have been better, there were a lot of factors.

Admiral cloudberg has a good deep dive on it. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...

marcosdumay3• 2 months ago

There were other near accidents before due to the exact same problem, the problem was well understood, and the changes needed to solve it was known.

Air France didn't implement them and Airbus didn't require them because of money. They thought the chance of it causing a real accident was low and decided to risk it. Despite there being known near accidents already.

And yes, "[the pilots] training should have been better" is part of the things that put both companies at fault. It's not the pilots fault that their training didn't cover it.

Svip• 2 months ago

Airbus didn't require them because of money

I am pretty confident that aircraft manufacturers themselves cannot require these things, only regulators can. The FAA in particular used to lean heavily on budget constraints for airlines (who would also push back against expensive upgrades); but I am sure the same applies to EASA and other regulators as well.

raverbashing3• 2 months ago

As much as I understand the culture of blameless post-mortems and the fact that people in that cockpit don't get the benefit of hindsight, maybe those other companies didn't have an accident because they followed procedure (which was a simple one)

Yes there were UX factors. Yes training could be better. Yes distractions happen

But if I'm going to blame the companies I'm going to blame them on putting someone inexperienced and probably who did not have the right mindset in navigating the profession. And meanwhile companies waste time in making automations on top of manual processes that make things even more complicated

foldr2• 2 months ago

There were other near accidents before due to the exact same problem, the problem was well understood, and the changes needed to solve it was known.

Could you be more specific here? The article doesn't even say which problem Airbus are considered to be criminally liable for.

mrnicegu• 2 months ago

Yes, an autonomous plane would have worked so much better. Can’t wait for AI to replace stupid apes.

anonymars4• 2 months ago

A crash instigated by failure in software automation inputs would have been better handled by full AI software automation?

404mm• 2 months ago

Is this the crash where the pilot failed to recognize the airspeed sensors had frozen up and he stalled the plane? I could see how this was an Air France fault since the pilot was not properly trained or experienced to fly this plane in these conditions. Not sure why Airbus is responsible.

NooneAtAll3• 2 months ago

it's the crash where pushing nose of the plane down (correct enough-altitude stall response) caused alarms to activate, while pulling nose up caused alarms to silence

no wonder airbus was found guilty

mlinhares• 2 months ago

Such an incredible write up, the piece about the importance of flying less technological planes to get a "sense" of what flying really is hits like a brick, specially in the world of LLMs producing code.

How do you get this "sense" of writing code and building systems by yourself if all you do is instruct some agent to do it? Are we all going to be like Bonin in the future where we just don't understand anything outside of the agent box?

This is both terrifying and sad.

deepsun• 2 months ago

Novella "Profession" by Isaac Asimov.

cladopa• 2 months ago

Actually there are more planes flying today than ever and the number of accidents is very very low, thanks to technological planes and protocols that lean from mistakes.

So low in fact that the majority of the recent "accidents" look like suicides from the pilots. The pilots know exactly what they are doing when crashing the planes.

ottobonn• 2 months ago

I'm a software engineer and recently got my pilot's license, and the training for the pilot's license increased my (already-high) respect for the aviation profession. All pilots learn to fly basic airplanes and have to do everything by hand (often on paper, but an iPad is allowed) to show they know the basics. The result is that by the time you work up to more advanced planes you have climbed the ladder of abstraction and know what underpins the automation.

The other piece of the picture is that pilots acknowledge that their skills are perishable, and they have to commit to ongoing training. This would be analogous to writing code by hand and getting a licensed engineer to sign off on your currency periodically even if you use LLMs for work.

altmanaltman3• 2 months ago

The irony of not understanding almost 100% of the code on modern airplanes is actually done by instructing a program to actually generate the code. It is neither terrifying nor sad. You expect humans to write millions of lines of code? At that scale, procedureally generating code is much safer and smarter.

smcin• 2 months ago

But it wasn't at all just about Bonin: Robert and Bonin repeatedly kept trying to override each other; Robert was giving Bonin some information with which he could have figured out he was stalling (although Robert was also trying to climb); and Dubois had gone to deal with his sleep deprivation without designating either of them as PIC, and when Dubois finally returned (2:11:40, sounds still sleep-deprived based on his confusion) he didn't recognize the obvious stall or take control until they had lost almost all of their altitude.

It makes Air France look worse that all three pilots didn't react properly (or weren't trained or experienced), than just faulting Bonin. And at least two of them were sleep-deprived. But there were multiple systemic failures, not just the pilots.

OneMorePerson2• 2 months ago

I think this was a pre-LLM issue, but will be exacerbated. I've worked with some people who would be reading logging data and about to do some big intervention when it was clear that the logger itself was having an issue and the results coming out were not really possible.

clickety_clack• 2 months ago

It reads exactly like "Ironies of Automation" by Bainbridge would predict.

pdpi• 2 months ago

Hmm I don't think it's as black and white as just blaming airbus.

Then it’s a good thing they didn’t. Both Airbus and Air France were found guilty, and poor pilot training was specifically called out as a reason why Air France was considered guilty. It’s in the article.

krig• 2 months ago

    --dangerously-skip-reading-the-article

Cider9986• 2 months ago

My cousin was one of the pilots. I heard he was a great guy, but I never got to meet him.

flightsteward12• 2 months ago

RIP

flightsteward12• 2 months ago

I remember reading about this 10-15 years ago. How is it possible that this almost took decades to resolve?

fithisux• 2 months ago

Welcome to Greek style justice.

MichaelZuo• 2 months ago

The Greeks really wallow in 17 year long court cases?

That seems a bit far fetched.

EdwardDiego2• 2 months ago

It's just usual justice when the defendants have a lot of very expensive lawyers.

EdwardDiego2• 2 months ago

1) It crashed in 2009

2) Flight recorders weren't recovered until 2011

3) Manslaughter charges initially recommended in 2011

4) Accident report released in 2012

5) A long time with a lot of lawyers arguing about whether or not the charges should be heard in court

6) Charges dropped in 2019

7) However, public prosecutor announced proceeding with prosecution in 2021

8) Trial began in 2022

9) Both Airbus and AF acquitted in 2023

10) Prosecutor lodges an appeal in 2023

11) Trial begins in appeals court in 2025

12) Appeals court finds both companies guilty in 2026

Basically - these are two huge companies in France, they have a _lot_ of well paid lawyers, and a lot of political heft, but then there was a large amount of public outrage - and so the debate about whether or not to actually prosecute the case continued 2012 through to 2021 - the prosecutor reopening the charges in 2021 was due to intense public pressure.

Cruically once it actually went to trial, it only took 4 years to reach a conclusion including with appeals, which is quicker than I'd expect - and something I noticed is that the appeals court was able to find them guilty, I'm not sure how it goes in other common law country judiciaries, but in my country, if this had gone to an appeals court, they don't have the power to find you guilty, but they could overturn the previous ruling, and direct the lower court to begin the trial again - so it would have been even slower.

I guess that's an aspect of civil law judicial systems that might be considered an advantage.

guerby• 2 months ago

In the french system an appeal is basically a re-trial since the appeal court can confirm, infirm or modify the lower court verdict.

bahmboo• 2 months ago

The are guilty of letting these terrible pilots fly humans over oceans. Sometimes the driver is bad and yet we point at the car and say it should have been designed "better". I have read a lot about this flight over the years and I have my obvious opinions.

tverbeure• 2 months ago

It's really a miracle that the black box was found.

mike_hock• 2 months ago

Can I commit manslaughter now and pay a one-digit percentage of my income as a fine?

nekzn• 2 months ago

That depends on what you make. Thankfully fines for crimes are not based around a percentage of your income.

Ylpertnodi• 2 months ago

Fines should be based on your income.

l23k4• 2 months ago

If you do it in a comparable manner? Probably.

Or, you know, just hit someone with a car. Criminal charges are often not filed even if the driver is clearly at fault.

astrobe_• 2 months ago

You can't send a "moral person" to jail, unlike "physical persons". But sometimes I wonder if taking a fraction of their shares from them would make them more... Moral I guess.

_DeadFred_3• 2 months ago

This. Government custody for a person is incarceration. Government custody for a business would be company stock incarceration.

KolmogorovComp• 2 months ago

To all here saying this is was only a pilot error. I'll ask you, do you also think it is only a programmer error when a critical memory-safety bug is introduced in C? And that they should be the only one responsible and face jail-time (or death, like here)? Or is there more at play? Why use C in safety-critical code, why wasn't it catched by reviewers, fuzzing, testing, etc ?

Error is not binary, it's a statistic. Even perfectly trained pilots/programmers do make errors depending on the situation. What you should ask is what the error chance is, and if it acceptable.

As the accident report shows, the exact same pitot tube failure happened at least 15 times and recovered by the pilots. The 16th time, it killed more than two hundred people. Do you think a 1/16 chance of dying is appropriate in modern aviation safety?

avadodin2• 2 months ago

I'm not sure what you're arguing for.

Out of the X% times this error occurs, are you okay with 1/16% failure? Can you avoid the failure-mode?

What if mode 2 fails 2x of the time and it can't be averted by switching to the Y language.

SomeHacker44• 2 months ago

1/16% is less than 0.001... A different number than being discussed, 1/16.

motxilo• 2 months ago

The captain was on a break when the co-pilots became confused by faulty air-speed readings. They then mistakenly pointed the nose of the plane upwards when it stalled, instead of down.

Investigators concluded the co-pilots did not have the training to deal with the situation

Blame.

alecco• 2 months ago

This is very personal to me. I took that flight several times. Always went through strong turbulence.

"At 32 years old, Bonin was the least experienced pilot on the flight crew. When the aircraft's pitot tubes froze and iced over in a storm, the automated systems temporarily failed and disabled the autopilot. This forced the crew into manual flight. Because the Airbus A330 features independent, non-linked sidesticks, the other co-pilot in the cockpit, David Robert, could not physically feel that Bonin was holding his stick back. The aircraft's computer simply averaged their opposing inputs."

The experience of pilots has been dropping like a stone. This is hidden due to new technology, but when unusual situations arise many current pilots have no situational awareness.

"A vote to reduce the 1,500-hour rule for pilot training will mean blood on your hands when the inevitable accident occurs as a result of an inadequately trained flight crew."

-- Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger

_DeadFred_3• 2 months ago

Reminder to highlight the morality of Airbus.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/airbus-agrees-pay-ov...

Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash

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