I disagree, a complete lack of sensitivity in the way he was communicating his ideas was evident from the very beginning. He does have good points to make, but as a journalist he should surely be aware of the need to understand the target audience? As it is, he practically guaranteed that no-one here was prepared to listen to his "direct, no holds barred approach". He could have expressed himself better, and had his ideas accepted on merit.
I have to disagree with alemaobaiano on this.
While I am not an aviation expert, I am an expert on the Brazilian press, and they jump rapidly to a conclusion as to who are the heroes and villians, and it seems no amount of evidence, expressed in any terms whatsover, will cause them to listen to sense.
I posted above a column by senator Demosthenes Torres, published two days before the Legacy pilots left Brazil, in which he acknowledged the correctness of Joe's blog posts.
The problems was not the tone, but the message: blaming the American pilots for the tragedy provided convenient scapegoats, appealed to anti-Americanism, and allowed people not to bother their heads with troublesome details such as poorly designed software. Anyone who insisted on pointing out facts became rapidly unpopular.
The third anniversary of the tragedy is coming up Tuesday, and some ordinarily serious newspapers have published nonsense put out by a group that calls itself the "Association of Friends and Relatives of the Victims of Flight 1907". They claim to represent the families of 154 victims; in fact they represent the families of somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of that number.
The Brazilian press learned that, the last time this lynch mob howled for blood, but that was close to a year ago, and press memories are short, and the unwarned reporter always sides with whoever calls themself a victim.
The groups "facts" are wildly inaccurate; they have an "accident expert" with whom I spoke and who astonished me by saying that he'd been hired not by the lawyers, but by the group's press agent.
They lost their loved ones, and I sympathize with that, but they also lost their love of truth, if they ever had it. And they are dangerous to others.
Those most interested in the investigation of the Gol 1907 accident are not the relatives of the victims. Rather, it is those who will live or die depending on whether the causes of this accident are found and fixed - or not.
Joe Sharkey spoke the truth, early and often, and the Association has never issued a press release without a glaring error or a bald-faced lie.
Why is Joe criticized, and this Association blindly believed? It is neither the quality of their information, nor the tone in which they communicate. It's that what Joe says isn't what the press wants to hear - and the Association provides the easy-to-swallow lies that lazy reporters eat up.