Alemaobaiano,
Thanks for your reasoned and insightful post, far more so than my last one. I agree with just about everything you've said.
My tending toward an ass-covering explanation was an exercise in adding the near total absence of news coverage of a serious incident to the still relatively opaque conduct of Brazilian aviation authorities and spicing it with TAP upper management's close ties with those same authorities.
Had it been more than an incident, there would have been all sorts of bad press flying around, much of it damaging to more public/corporate reputations than those of the unfortunate crew. Or damaging to projects, e.g. the Varig/TAP deal. Therefore, better to carefully ensure, throughout both systems, that nothing unfiltered is said.
The only quarrel with that, of course, is that the incident doesn't find its way quickly into the knowlege base of the hundreds of crews flying into GRU every day and, from there, to greater awareness of a specific threat.
Note FJP's comment a few posts up, twy 25m wide. A340's track just under 11m. Whew.