PBL
You and many others have been extremely generous of your time on this thread. ATC Watcher!
In an anecdotal vein, some of the responses from the Brazilian end remind me of when I was stopped by a policeman while driving the wrong way up a one-way street where the traffic sign had been knocked down. “Sorry, officer, it’s not signposted”. “But everyone knows this is a one-way street, your fault for not knowing”.
You’ve mentioned the need to bridge a cultural discrepancy regarding the way Brazilians and non-Brazilians see the consequences of not following international ATC standards. I think your interpretation has a lot to do with the absence of contributions by Brazilian pilots and other professionals on here, which you’ve also mentioned. Had there been such contributions, I suspect they would echo those of the international community very closely.
The real discrepancy is more related to Brazil’s Portuguese legal and cultural baggage, which tends to surface in situations where it’s easier to apportion blame and decapitate the offender than to absorb the tragedy and apply whatever lessons might be learned from it to avoiding similar ones in future.
That, alongside a military ATC system where most of the professionals are long-serving subalterns and the “managers” are heirarchically superior but less experienced.
Were Brazilian commercial pilots and controllers to post here I do think the views expressed would be much closer to Barit1’s posting of 22 Oct.
As to why they haven’t come forward, I’d venture a few guesses, the main one being that they can be fairly easily identified. For all the size of Brazil’s air transport network, it’s still a small community. There are hundreds if not thousands of pilots wanting flying jobs and it’s not an economy where, if you’re not flying you can easily get a well-paying job doing something else. Speaking out can damage one’s career prospects. For the controllers, there’s military discipline and, usually, a linguistic challenge.
As to what happens now, post CPI, whew, I wonder. The air force seem to have been successful in rebuffing attempts to take ATC away but it would be inconceivable to presume they’d not absorbed some of the lessons. The CENIPA report will throw some light on that and I expect it will be at least moderately self-critical. After publication there will be a response from the air force and corresponding signals from the executive, and we might see some gradual changes.
For now, part of the CPI report is scathing toward Infraero, the airports authority, recommending the indictment of over twenty managers and directors on grounds of corruption. The executive response, apparently not related but in reality very much so, via the president’s chief-of-staff, has been “we’d like to see airports privatised.” Piano, piano...
For anyone else who might like to download the CPI final report, the 12.5mb pdf file (in Portuguese) can be found at:
http://www2.camara.gov.br/internet/c..._REVFinal1.pdf