Firstly may all who died R.I.P. on the GOL 737
I presume that all crew & pax on the Embraer survived the accident? The embraer crews testimony & FDR ,CVR will provide important info to investigators. Also the Embraer survived the accident so I imagine that yhe damaged wing will yield some clues due to crossmetal contamination etc upon impact as to actually where it struck the 737
/If TCAS is told a false altitude it obviously won't do the right thing.
Is there a plausible single technical fault or setting error in either of the two aircraft which could give this outcome?QUOTE]A buried comment in the story on msnbc says "Nevertheless, radars showed the Legacy and the Boeing were flying with an altitude difference of about 1,000 feet."
Is the altitude reference for TCAS and the transponder from which traffic radar display altitude the same?
I dont know much about Embraers but from memory the 737 NG has 2 fully independebt ADC's independently powered & individual sensors & probes feeding each ADC. The output from both ADC's is constantly monitored by its own internal BITE system & if any parameter is incorrect that ADC will become INOP automatically. Each Xpndr is fed from its own ADC & the TCAS processor( single unit) is fed from the output of each Xpndr. All outputs are on digital data buses with crosstalk & feedback possibilities all monitored by internal Bite in the LRU's.
I would presume that the TCAS system on the Embraer would be very similar as TCAS in all A/C's is a FAA approved stand alone system