Airbus Faces Charges Over 2009 Rio-Paris Crash

mayberry42 writes "A French judge filed preliminary manslaughter charges Thursday against Airbus over the 2009 crash of an Air France jet — opening a rare criminal investigation against a corporate powerhouse. The order from Judge Sylvie Zimmerman targeting the European planemaker centers on the June 2009 crash into the Atlantic of an Airbus A330 bound for Paris from Rio de Janeiro, killing all 228 people on board."

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[CaptainZapp]

Yeah, the plane that Captain Sullenberger landed on the Hudson without any engines didn't have a glass..

Er, wait!

That was an airbus 320, er, nervermind.

But the GP's icing on the cake is the introductory statement:

This is the result of a computer controlled fly-by-wire airplane having a cascade failure.

Er; right. Theories abound and nobody has any hard facts, except, aparently, the GP dude.

Sounds like a Boeing shill to me.

Re:It shouldn't of happened so they are in court

[Richard_at_work]

There was a cascade failure - the aircraft was sending maintenance messages to its maintenance base at the time of the crash, which told Airbus quite a bit of information, including the fact that the computers had decided to exclude themselves from decision making (which is extremely serious).

Another thing to note is that the Hudson A320 was still in Alternate Law when it ditched (none of the failures were severe enough to push the computers to take themselves out of the loop, and neither pilot took the measures necessary to do that manually) - the pilots had assistance from the computers to land the aircraft and they still managed to land their plane safely! How could that be if the Airbus system is so unsafe?

Re:What happens if they're found guilty?

[Coren22]

There are US citizens in Gitmo?