I have just looked over the past five months of posts. There are some bits of news from Brazil that are misleading or simply false. Some of them are lies, that is the authors made up "facts" which they assumed posters here would not or could not check.
Things seem currently quiet, so this seems a good time for some clarifications, before things heat up with the eventual release of the Cenipa report. So here goes:
- The CENIPA draft report has not been leaked.
- While the House CPI preliminary report accused both the Legacy pilots and the controllers, the final report accused only the pilots. That was not a technical but a political decision, according to the official House news agency:
The report referee of the Aviation Crisis CPI, congressman Marco Maia (PT-RS), accepted, shortly before approving the report, a suggestion by congressman Miguel Martini (PHS-MG) to remove from the text the typification of the supposed crimes committed by the air traffic controllers. The removal was an agreement among all the congressmen on the commission. The report still carries the names of the five controllers, but without characterizing crimes. Maia explained that the Prosecutors' Office has already concluded the investigation of these controllers, and it was the CPI's political position to not indict them. (
http://www2.camara.gov.br/internet/h...html?pk=111308)
- The House CPI preliminary report was 170 pages, in translation, and dealt exclusively with the Gol 1907 tragedy. The final report, 713 pages, dealt also with the TAM Airbus crash and the aviation system in general, and seemed to include the portion related to Gol 1907 largely unchanged. I didn't compare the two reports page by page, but looked at minor errors such as "level" where "limit" was meant, and found them uncorrected, so I've assumed the rest was not revised. Only the conclusions changed, by political decision. The English version of the preliminary report can be found at js.biztravelife.com/preliminary.pdf
- Regarding the initial clearance given to the Legacy pilots, it was given and properly confirmed by the pilots as 37,000 feet to Manaus. That's on page 54-55 of the translated report cited above.
- The CPI report makes clear that Brazilian controllers had a habit of giving only the first level in the clearance, as was done with Legacy N600XL. The report says on page 38:
From everything that has been set out, it may be concluded that the issuance of a message with partial authorization for an aircraft’s flight is a procedure without any grounding in rules and procedures.
In other words, the controllers were following habits, not the rules. Unfamiliar with Brazilian airspace, the Legacy pilots followed the published rules. That's what rules are for, and that's why they're published. So everyone can know what they are, and follow them.
- The radio problem is far clearer with a sector map, and alas the sector map in the preliminary report compressed to illegibility. But, let's look at Page 71:
Combined with information from Technical Report 1.187/07-INC: the Legacy is leaving ACC-Brasilia Sector 5, and entering ACC-Brasilia Sector 7, receiving instructions from the Sector 5 controller to change radio to frequency 125.05 in the new sector.
Frequency 125.05 is correct for Sector 9, which the Legacy never entered, and which was aft and starboard of it at that moment, and got father aft as it flew. The frequency could be heard for perhaps another 120 nautical miles beyond Brasilia, but the Legacy had passed beyond reach by the time the Sector 7 controller first attempted to call it.
- The Legacy continued to hear chatter in Portuguese though, never going more than seven minutes without some radio traffic, but not knowing the language was unaware it was hearing only the air portions of conversations. By great misfortune, just before the collision as the co-pilot was calling Brasilia, he heard a message from Brasilia to him, with exactly the words "in blind" inaudible, and assumed he was being answered. The pilots were not required to make contact until the handoff to Manaus, just about the time of the collision, and had no reason to believe they were out of contact.
- Of the non-emergency frequencies listed on the navigation chart for Sector 7, three of four were disabled at the controller's console. Control center tapes captured calls by N600XL to two of the three frequencies, and on the ground soon after the collision the copilot testified he'd tried the third. ATC tried only one frequency to reach N600XL.
- The Federal Police investigation of the Gol 1907 accident relies heavily on a translation of the Legacy's voice data recorder. That transcription was leaked to the press on Sunday of Carnaval last year. The Federal Police translation is criminally poor. Even numbers are mistranslated. See page 70 of the preliminary report for three incorrect numbers (The gray background is the PF's Portuguese on the left, with equivalent English to the right; the white background has original English on the right, with an accurate translation on the left.)
Some phrases widely quoted are so incorrect as to suggest bad faith. One of the pilots was quoted on the front page of the leading newspaper as having said after the collision, the Portuguese equivalent of "So what if we hit someone?" In fact what he said was "What if we hit something?"
There is a tendency in the Brazilian press to assume that everything is an opinion, that there are two sides to every question, and that if the Federal Police translate 17,000 pounds of fuel as 1,700 pounds of fuel, well that's an official view that has to be respected. That's a load of hooey. 15,300 pounds' worth.
- Richard