Air France and Airbus cleared of involuntary manslaughter over 2009 crash
The families of victims of France’s worst air disaster said they were devastated after a Paris court cleared Air France and Airbus of manslaughter charges over the 2009 crash that caused the deaths of 228 people.
Giving its verdict on Monday, the court said that if there had been faults committed, “no certain causal link” with the accident had been demonstrated.
David Koubbi, a lawyer for the families of a number of passengers, said the court’s ruling was “incomprehensible”.
The derailment of a Norfolk Southern Corp. train in a small Ohio town last month is putting renewed attention on the role of sensors that railroads use in a bid to prevent such accidents.
The railroad, in response, announced new safety initiatives, including adding 200 temperature detectors to parts of its tracks where existing sensors are at least 15 miles apart, starting near the derailment site in East Palestine.
Major freight railroads plan to add roughly 1,000 of these detectors across their key routes, according to the Association of American Railroads, an industry trade group.
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The long-delayed Ethiopian government report into the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 that killed all 157 people on board laid blame solely on Boeing.
“Repetitive and uncommanded airplane-nose-down inputs” from a new flight control system on the MAX, triggered by a single faulty sensor, put the airplane in an “unrecoverable” dive, the Ethiopian report, released Dec. 23, concludes.
The subsequent French and American critiques — a rare fracture among the safety authorities participating in an air accident investigation — don’t dispute Boeing’s role, but present a fuller picture of the tragedy’s cause.
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If you passed on getting the COVID vaccine, you might be a lot more likely to get into a car crash.
Or at least those are the findings of a new study published this month in The American Journal of Medicine. During the summer of 2021, Canadian researchers examined the encrypted government-held records of more than 11 million adults, 16% of whom hadn’t received the COVID vaccine.
They found that the unvaccinated people were 72% more likely to be involved in a severe traffic crash—in which at least one person was transported to the hospital—than those who were vaccinated. That’s similar to the increased risk of car crashes for people with sleep apnea, though only about half that of people who abuse alcohol, researchers found.
Of course, skipping a COVID vaccine does not mean that someone will get into a car crash. Instead, the authors theorize that people who resist public health recommendations might also “neglect basic road safety guidelines.”
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