Legal Defense Costs - why you will never get the comfort you need
I have followed this case for a few years. It is not the first, or last, aviation crash where criminal charges will be brought against aviation professionals. AF447 grinds on in front of Mdme Zimmerman as we speak. BUT, you won't get any aviation insurer or airline to give you the comfort you deserve.
The aviation insurers of any airline have zero obligation to pay any criminal legal defence fees, under any circumstances. The aviation insurers are there to bail out the airline for compensation claims by the families of the dead and injured, and that includes expensive aviation lawyers to defend the airline for those civil claims.
Aviation Insurers only ever start to fork out for criminal lawyers, if they think it is expedient to their financial interests in the civil compensation claims. Put another way, if criminal charges/convictions somehow make the civil claims more expensive, this is bad for the aviation insurers as their bill goes up. Then there is a clear financial interest on the insurers behalf in paying less: so it then only makes sense to spend money on criminal lawyers, as well as civil lawyers, in an attempt to reduce the total bill.
So, money seems to trump human rights or air safety in certain situations.
All rather unsettling, and unsatisfactory.