An article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer provides photos and, as seems inevitable, misinformation.
The military base - not the airfield - had been secret because it contained a borehole for testing a Brazilian atomic bomb, a project abandoned over 20 years ago, the secrecy being lifted many years before the Gol 1907 crash. The base has served for support in other air accidents, such as Varig RG-254 that took a wrong turn and got 1,000 miles lost in 1989. See Ivan Sant'Anna's book "Caixa-Preta" for more details.
Embraer Legacy 600 jet makes journey to Cleveland, years after colliding with jetliner over Brazil | cleveland.com
Embraer Legacy 600 jet makes journey to Cleveland, years after colliding with jetliner over Brazil
Published: Friday, November 19, 2010, 4:23 PM Updated: Saturday, November 20, 2010, 4:45 AM
Alison Grant, The Plain Dealer
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View full sizeJoshua Gunter, The Plain DealerA corporate Embraer Legacy 600 comes to a stop Friday outside the hangar at Constant Aviation at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. The jet languished for years at a remote airstrip in Brazil, where it made an emergency landing after clipping a Boeing 737 in the air. The 737 crashed, killing 154 people aboard.
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The corporate jet was on its maiden flight, zooming 37,000 feet above dense Amazonian jungle, when the seven people on board felt a jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by silence.
The Embraer Legacy 600 had struck something, nobody knew what. And the collision had sheared off a 5-foot-tall winglet at the end of one of its wings.
"The leading edge of the wing was losing rivets and starting to peel back," travel writer Joe Sharkey later wrote about the near-death experience, which he called the most harrowing half hour of his life.
The pilot and co-pilot stayed calm, scanning the impenetrable rainforest for a place to land. But the Legacy was losing speed. The situation was quickly deteriorating.
Then one of the pilots spotted a runway through the dark canopy. The corporate jet came down hard on a landing strip of what turned out to be a secret military base. The passengers and crew stumbled off the aircraft . . . facing drawn guns.
That they were alive was a fact of almost insurmountable odds, Sharkey recalled in a column for The New York Times. "Maybe we are all actually dead," he remembered joking as gallows humor broke out in the barracks where military personnel had sent them to sleep.
A few hours later they learned the terrible news from the only one among them to speak Portuguese.
The commander at Cachimbo Air Base said that a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 with 154 people on board was reported missing right where the smaller plane felt the collision. No one survived on the jetliner. It was the deadliest accident in Brazilian aviation history.
The Embraer Legacy languished at the military base, ensnared in investigations and legal charges.
But at 11 a.m. Friday -- more than four years after the accident on Sept. 29, 2006 -- it landed at Cleveland Hopkins International Aiport and taxied up to the hangar of Constant Aviation.
A team of 10 engineers, mechanics and avionics specialists from Constant Aviation spent several weeks in October working on the aircraft at the Cachimbo base. The base had long since been declassified as a secret military outpost because of worldwide news of the crash.
View full sizeJoshua Gunter, The Plain DealerThe storied corporate jet will remain in Cleveland for three months for repairs.
The Legacy had spent a year and a half outside in jungle dampness. All of its Honeywell avionics displays had to be replaced, Constant Aviation President Steve Maiden said, in addition to fixing the damaged left wing and a damaged tail part.
Constant Aviation -- the single largest U.S. repair company for the Embraer Legacy -- had contacted the company that insured the aircraft after the accident.
Constant Aviation does about 70 percent of Legacy scheduled maintenance on Legacys in the United States and 99 percent of 48-month inspections for U.S.-registered Legacys.
"That's our niche," Maiden said.
Constant Aviation also has a mobile recovery team that specializes in heavy structural repair of damaged planes. The company recently sent a team to Ottawa, Canada, to remove and replace the nose section of a plane.
The Legacy involved in Brazil had initially been purchased by charter/management firm ExcelAire of Ronkonkoma, N.Y., and was on its delivery flight from an Embraer factory when the accident happened.
The Legacy's insurer declared the plane a write-off and sold it to a new owner, whom Maiden did not identify. AINonline, an aviation news site, said FAA records listed the new owner as Cloudscape of Wilmington, Del.
The storied Legacy will be at Constant Aviation's repair facility at Hopkins for about three months, undergoing a detailed, 2,500-hour inspection and getting a new wing.
Dan Hubbard, spokesman for the National Business Aviation Association, said it's the only business jet he's heard of that collided with a jetliner, much less made it through the horrifying occurrence.
"You're talking inches, and something else could have happened," Maiden said. "If there was a 2-foot difference, they wouldn't have hit each other. Of if the 737 was 18 inches higher, the 737 would have made it."
The crash site of the jetliner was found after a day-long search using multiple planes and helicopters. Rescuers had difficulty reaching the site because of the dense forest. Some rappelled out of aircraft to reach the wreckage.
The cause of the accident is still in dispute, although there is no question that the planes were flying at the same altitude. The accident was investigated by both the Brazilian Air Force and the U.S. National Transportation and Safety Board.
Brazil concluded the collision resulted from a combination of errors from air traffic controllers and the Legacy's pilots. The NTSB said the pilots of both planes acted properly and pointed to a variety of air traffic control errors.