On June 1, 2009, Air France flight 447 disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. There were 228 people, including passengers and crew, on board the Airbus A330 jet. While some wreckage was found in the mid-Atlantic within days of the flight’s disappearance, it took nearly two years to find most of the fuselage and the plane’s flight data recorders, which were on the ocean floor. After a lengthy investigation, the crash was linked to the failure of the pitot probes, which track airspeed. The failure caused the autopilot to disengage, forcing the pilots to manually adjust the plane’s speed. Conflicting actions in the cockpit in the wake of the failure doomed the plane.
In the wake of the accident, it came to light that issues with the pitot probes were known by Airbus and Air France and that an upgrade had been ordered. However, Air France flight 447 still had the problematic pitot probes. In May 2026 the Paris Appeals Court found that Airbus and Air France were guilty of corporate manslaughter. Both companies were fined approximately $260,000.