Last year there was a terrible disaster in Brazil when a Boeing 737-800 from GOL Airlines collided over the jungle with a Embraer Legacy bought by US Excel Air. The Legacy was able to land safely at Cachimbo AirForce Base in Mato Grosso. The Boeing desintegrated in the air. One of the passengers at the Legacy was a journalist from NYTimes who has a blog:
http://sharkeyonbrazil.*************/
Since that accident things in Brazil have been messy. The Brazilian government and the Air Force have been consistently saying that the equipment and software of the Brazilian Traffic Control is state of the art and safe. The disaster has been investigated by many groups: local police, federal police, House of Representative Committee, Senate Committee and CENIPA the Air Force investigative and preventive agency. CENIPA has not issued a final report. NTSB is helping. But the Federal Police and the House of Representative Committee have come out with final statements blaming the two Legacy pilots and four controllers in Brasilia. The controllers claimed that their equipments were faulty and they did not like being blamed by the Air Force that denies any problems with the equipments. At one point they were so scared of being criminally blamed that they made a strike and operations slowdowns... Now some of them are being persecuted by the Air Force for making a Motin. Just to give you all a taste of the political side of what goes on in Brazil.
Then came the TAM accident. The government did not want the runway at Congonhas to be blamed because it is administered by a government agency (Infraero). TAM did not want to be blamed. Airbus did not want to be blamed. The disaster has been investigated by all the agencies that got involved with the GOL disaster. CENIPA says that it will take about one year for a final report to be issued.
Since the accident TAM has decided that its planes will not longer land in wet runways with one reverser inoperant, and also that it will install the new warning signs in its planes to advise the pilots about the wrong TLs
positions. Airbus has issued a note saying that there was nothing wrong with the plane and advising again the pilots how to operate the A320 with one reverser out. Congonhas is grooving the runway and it will be done by September 8th. Today I saw in TV that they are going to install "nets"
at the ends of the runway (have no idea of how these nets will work) and also soft cement to brake the planes. (I guess paralell to the runway, in the ends).
The Minister of Defense has changed. The Chief of Infraero has changed, The officers of ANAC are under attack because they were supposed to regulate the airlines but they accepted thousand of free tickets from them. The new Minister of Defense diverted traffic from Congonhas to Guarulhos but he now wants the runway in Guarulhos also repaved and this will create problems. He doesn't want Congonhas to remain as a hub for Sao Paulo. He is also saying that he wants more space between the seats in the airplanes (indeed they have been shrinking). Some say that he wants to run for President in 2010...
Today, one month after the TAM disaster, relatives and friends of the victims made demonstrations in Congonhas, in front of the building where the plane crashed, and in Rio de Janeiro. Yes, as a said before, Policia Federal has interviewed 20 pilots and they all said that they did not believe that the two pilots at that flight would commit the elementary error that has been said they did. Also there are now reports of 11 planes that skidded in Congonhas the day before the disaster, one of them leaving the runway. On the day of the disaster also planes that landed before reported the runway as being slippery "as a soap".
To finish...I guess we will have to wait one year to hear a final report from CENIPA. Unfortunately CENIPA belongs to the Air Force that administers Traffic Controll in Brazil (military).
I guess there is a lot of work ahead before we go back to a state of art Air Traffic Control and safe airports in Brazil. Letīs hope and play that nothing else will happen in the near future.
Sometimes I see air disasters as a
symptoms of larger problems involving a lot of variables.