Atlaw, do not shoot at the wrong target, it is not PBL who mentioned “ self loading cargo , Lawyers and other clowns “ , it was A310 driver.
You seem upset to be associated with clowns, I can understand that but I can understand as well what A310 was trying to say. Neophytes in aviation have a tendency, when confronted with an accident, to see conspiracies everywhere and deny simple basic facts. . This is human nature I guess.
Nobody here is trying to make up your mind for you or to mislead you away from the truth. Some of us have knowledge you do not have and are trying to educate persons like you, that unfortunately, as you rightly said, can send us to jail for a long time because they had formed a wrong impression. The Linate trial after the Ground collision there is a prime example of this.
You are at least honest and put in your profile who you really are : an attorney in Brazil involved with that case .
This is for this reason that I am still here, talking to you. Some could say wasting my time, but I have been there before.
I am glad you are here talking to us, because maybe I can convince you of something : Nobody , not any pilot, not any controller that I know of would willingly put the life of others at risk. Circumstances, are putting people in a position to do great harm, but the conditions leading to those actions are never simple , because multiple.
Focusing on the Flight level issue, or on the 2 Americans pilots , is, in my opinion totally wrong, but perhaps this is where the FAB wants you to look at. Blame 2 foreign pilots and 4 low rank controllers , so that 154 people died because of single human errors, so that the whole system is safe. Humans errors is like people not doing their jobs. Send them to jail and Brazil is safe. End of the story.
Never look at how the ATC system is programmed, what it shows to controllers when something is odd, what is the real, actual radar coverage above the area in question, and what is the quality of the radar returns,. Do not question the authorities that put a transfer of communications between 2 major ATC centers in a zone of known lack of VHF coverage, and of radar coverage ( at least from Brasilia ) .
Never ask how your national manufacturer, Embraer put a PRIMUS avionic suite in their aircraft so badly programmed, that a foot rest or a wrong input can switch the transponder off, make it invisible to TCAS and do not warn the pilots about it.
I could continue the list, but I thing you got my point by now.
If your aim is to learn the truth, then ask those questions, BEFORE, there is plenty of time afterwards to determine the percentage of responsibility for each player.
But for us here, the professionals in this forum , the aim is not to see people blamed. The aim is to make sure the Brazilian authorities understand what is wrong , change the procedures and the systems accordingly , in order that a collision like this one never happens again in Brazil.
I rest my case.