2023年4月17日

巴黎一家法院将于周一宣布对法航(Air France)和飞机制造商空中客车(Airbus)就2009年一架从里约飞往巴黎的航班坠毁事件进行审判的判决，遇难者家属希望法官能无视检察官提出的不寻求定罪的建议。检察官表示，在12月结束的为期八周的听证会上，“不可能”给这两家航空巨头定罪，他们被指控犯有过失杀人罪，但否认了这些指控。去年10月，这两家总部位于法国的公司接受了审判，以确定它们对法航历史上最严重的空难的责任。法航AF447航班上有228人遇难。如果判决在格林尼治标准时间11点30分宣布时被判有罪，这两家公司只面临22.5万欧元(合25万美元)的罚款，但声誉的象征意义很重要。受害者家属对检察官的建议感到愤怒。代表遇难者的协会主席丹尼尔·拉米(Daniele Lamy)表示，遇难者家属不接受该建议，称该建议基本上是对飞行员不利，而不是对航空公司不利。她说:“我们希望，我们期待的是，法院最终宣布一个公正的裁决，并谴责空客和法航，这两家公司应该为疏忽和失败负责。”“这是我们奋斗了近14年的目标。”他们的律师之一塞巴斯蒂安•贝茜(Sebastien Busy)表示，家属们有“自信的期待”和“对正义的渴望”。他们“希望法庭听取我们的论点，我们将对原因作出解释，并确定责任”。 Throughout the trial, representatives of Airbus and Air France maintained the companies were not guilty of criminal wrongdoing. Their lawyers demanded acquittal, describing this as a "difficult decision from a human point of view, but technically and legally justified". The prosecutors' decision not to seek a conviction does not mean that the three-person team of judges overseeing the trial has to follow their advice. Prosecutors initially dropped charges against the companies in 2019 in a decision that also infuriated victims' families. A Paris appeals court overturned this decision in 2021 and ordered the trial to go ahead. At the heart of hearings in Paris has been 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. "For us, what led the crew to react in the way they did remains a mystery in most respects," Air France representative Pascal Weil, a former test pilot, told the court on November 10. Airbus has also blamed pilot error as the main cause for the crash during proceedings. But lawyers for the families have emphasised how both companies were aware of the Pitot tube problem before the crash, and that the pilots were not trained to deal with a high-altitude emergency of this nature. The model of Pitot tube used on the doomed Airbus plane, manufactured by French company Thales, was replaced on aircraft worldwide after the accident. The crash also prompted an overhaul of training protocols across the industry, in particular to prepare pilots to handle the intense stress of unforeseen circumstances. On October 17, lawyers and victims' families were allowed to listen to the chilling in-flight voice recording of the pilots' final minutes for the first time. "We've lost our speeds," one pilot is heard saying before a recorded warning sounds -- "stall, stall, stall" -- and the aircraft begins to plunge towards the Atlantic Ocean. It took nearly two years to recover the "black box" flight recorders which were found nearly 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) below sea level. © Copyright AFP 2023. All rights reserved. IBT Fast Start - Let the best of International News come to you Sign up and stay up to date with our daily newsletter. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . Join the Discussion