A Paris appeals court on Thursday found Air France and Airbus guilty of manslaughter over the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, which killed all 228 people on board when it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The verdict came after an eight-week trial into one of France’s deadliest aviation disasters. The court ruled that both companies were responsible for the accident, overturning an earlier ruling in 2023 that had freed them of criminal liability.Both Air France and Airbus were fined €225,000, the maximum fine under French law for this type of offence. However, several relatives of the victims said the sentence was too lenient considering the scale of the tragedy.The companies denied wrongdoing and said they would challenge the decision through legal means.Danielle Lamy, president of the AF447 victims’ association, whose son died in the crash, called the verdict an important step forward for grieving families demanding accountability. He said the verdict shows that authorities have begun to recognize “the pain of families facing a collective tragedy of unbearable cruelty”.Flight AF447 was carrying 216 passengers and 12 crew members from 33 countries when it crashed on June 1, 2009. The victims included 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians, 26 Germans, five British, three Irish citizens and two Americans. Brazilian Prince Pedro Luis de Orléans e Bragança was among those killed.This disaster remains one of the aviation industry’s most complex accident investigation and recovery operations. Search teams searched nearly 10,000 square kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean for months before locating the wreckage. The flight recorders were eventually recovered in 2011 after a deep sea search operation.French investigators concluded in 2012 that a faulty airspeed sensor and pilot error caused the crash. During bad weather ice crystals blocked the aircraft’s pitot tubes, causing inconsistencies in speed readings that confused the aircraft’s systems. Investigators found that the pilots responded incorrectly after the plane entered an aerodynamic stall, causing the plane to rapidly lose altitude before crashing into the sea.The accident prompted major changes in aviation safety procedures, including better pilot training for high altitude stalls and replacement of airspeed sensors on Airbus aircraft.The victims included Nelson Marinho Filho, who boarded the plane moments before it took off after a near miss. His family waited for more than two years before burying his remains. Eleven-year-old Alexander Burroy, from Bristol, was returning to England after a holiday in Brazil, while Irish doctors Eithne Walls, Jane Deasy and Aisling Butler also died in the crash while returning from holiday.According to Air France, the captain had logged more than 11,000 flight hours, including 1,700 hours on the Airbus aircraft involved in the accident. The aircraft was last inspected in April 2009, a few weeks before the accident.