Brazilian jet collides with small plane 1 minute ago



RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - A Brazilian jetliner with 140 people aboard was reported missing Friday over the Amazon jungle after colliding with a smaller executive jet, aviation authorities said.


Wladamir Caze, spokesman for the Brazilian aviation authority, told The Associated Press that Gol airlines flight 1907 left the jungle city of Manaus and disappeared after a collision.

He did not elaborate but news reports said the plane reportedly struck a Brazilian-made Legacy aircraft near the Serra do Cachimbo, a Para state city about 600 miles southeast of Manaus. The Legacy managed to land. Manaus is about 1,800 miles northwest of Rio.

The jetliner had been scheduled to make a stop in Brasilia before heading to Rio de Janeiro's Antonio Tom Jobim International Airport.

Brazilian airport authority President Jose Carlos Pereira said the air force was searching for the jet in a densely forested region.

Pereira said in an interview with CBN radio that a local farmer reported seeing a large plane flying low.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060930/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/brazil_plane_missing

Doesn't look good, but we can hope.

Hi Murray! Good to see you back! No it doesn't sound good at all... Here's hoping, that the passengers survived. I would imagine that they really won't know what happened until daybreak.

Barbara

By STAN LEHMAN

SAO PAULO, BRAZIL Sep 30, 2006 (AP)"” Brazilian air force pilots spotted the wreckage of a jetliner that crashed deep in the Amazon jungle, and an aviation official said Saturday it was unlikely any of the 155 people aboard had survived.

The president of Brazil's airport authority, Jose Carlos Pereira, said Gol airlines Flight 1907 was traveling at nearly 310 mph when it slammed into the ground on Friday.

"Our experience shows that when one cannot find the fuselage relatively intact and when the wreckage is concentrated in a relatively small area, the chances of finding any survivors are practically nonexistent," he said.

He said officials were investigating whether the newly purchased Boeing 737 collided with an executive jet before crashing.

If no survivors are found, it would be the deadliest air accident in Brazil's history. In 1982, a Boeing 727 operated by Brazil's now-defunct Vasp airline, crashed in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, killing 137 people.

Pereira said pilots searched for the plane through the night before finding the wreckage. He said the jungle canopy is so thick that helicopters will have to lower emergency crews by rope, then those on the ground would cut down trees to create areas large enough for the helicopters to land.

"The jungle is so dense that we're going to have to open it up," Pereira said. "It's a very complex operation, it's extremely humid there, and there are millions of mosquitoes."

The Gol flight vanished Friday on its way from Manaus, a major river city in the heart of the Amazon rain forest, to Rio de Janeiro, 1,700 miles away.

The manager of a cattle ranch near the crash site said the plane may have crashed inside the nearby Xingu Indian reservation.

"We heard a loud explosion and some of our employees saw a plane flying low," Milton Picalho, the manager of the 49,000-acre ranch, said by phone.

The cause of the crash was unclear, but Pereira said the jetliner may have either collided with a Legacy executive jet or the two aircraft may have grazed each other.


"It is impossible to confirm that there is a relation between the incident which caused the (Legacy) crew to perform an emergency landing in Cachimbo and the disappearance of the Gol airplane," federal aviation officials said in a statement early Saturday morning.

The smaller plane, which carries up to 16 passengers, was making its inaugural flight to the United States, where it had been purchased by an American company, said its manufacturer, Embraer.

It was piloted by a U.S. citizen, who had left from the airport in Sao Jose dos Campos, near Sao Paulo, said Bueno, the regional flight protection head in Sao Paulo.

The commercial flight between Manaus and Rio is popular with foreign tourists but there was no immediate word on the nationalities of those aboard.

U.S. Consular Officer Robin Busse was at the airport seeking a passenger list but did not say if any Americans had been aboard either plane.

Sergio Misaci, 47, said his brother Lazaro, 58, had been traveling to Brasilia to celebrate their mother's 80th birthday.

"I have all the hope in the world. We have to root for them and have faith in God," Misaci said.

The Gol flight vanished in the same region where a Varig 737-300 plane crashed in 1989 with 54 people aboard, 46 of whom survived.

The crash was the first major incident for Gol Linhas Aereas Intelligentes SA, an upstart Brazilian airline that took to the skies in 2001 with just six Boeing 737s in 2001.

Since then Gol has rapidly gained market share by offering low-cost tickets, modeling its service after low-cost carriers in the United States and Europe. The company is now Brazil's second-largest airline.


Associated Press writers Tales Azzoni and Alan Clendenning, in Sao Paulo, and Vivian Sequera, in Brasilia, contributed to this report.


http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2511623

155 feared dead in Amazon aircrash

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Sunday October 1, 2006
The Observer


A desperate search for survivors was under way deep in the Amazon rainforest yesterday after a Boeing 737 with 155 people on board crashed, after apparently being in collision with a private jet.
Last night, all 149 passengers and six crew members were presumed dead after the Gol Airlines budget flight between Manaus and Brasilia disappeared from radar screens on Friday afternoon over dense jungle. Reports yesterday suggested the plane had plummeted nose-first into the jungle in the worst air disaster in Brazilian history.

Several foreigners are thought to have been on board, among them an 11-month-old baby, a Canadian citizen and 20 employees of the Japanese multinational Yamaha.

Five helicopters and eight air force planes were scouring the remote crash site yesterday afternoon, as anxious families and friends of passengers gathered at Rio de Janeiro's international airport seeking information.

At 9.30am yesterday, fragments of wreckage were spotted around 2,000km north-east of Rio de Janeiro by Brazilian air force spotter planes. Jose Carlos Pereira, the president of Brazil's airport authorities, said there were unlikely to be any survivors.

'It is very difficult to have survivors with such an impact,' Pereira told reporters in Brasilia. He said the plane appeared to have fallen in a 'vertical position'.

There was still confusion over reports suggesting the Boeing 737-800 had been hit by a mystery private jet, apparently piloted by an American, somewhere over the state of Mato Grosso.

With about 300 rescue workers still struggling to reach the isolated crash site, details of what happened were scarce yesterday. Officials said the Boeing disappeared from radar screens somewhere over Sao Felix do Xingu, a remote frontier town.

Ademir Ribeiro, an employee of a remote farm near the crash site, told Brazilian television that his colleagues had seen the plane just before it came down.

'The people here saw a large plane making strange movements and losing altitude,' he told Reuters.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1884877,00.html

How in the heck does a passenger jet collide with a little tiny jet and the passenger jet is the one that crashes? You'd think the little tiny jet would have gotten ripped to pieces and damaged long before the passenger jet.

I've had the same thought, Murray. I don't get it either...

The only thing I can think of is it must have sliced a part of the jet with it's wing or tail in an area where the jet was weak, and would have caused it to crash. Perhaps like a hydraulics line or something. Must have been a razor thin slice though.

I guess that makes sense but the whole thing sounds bizarre. I haven't heard anything about it recently, have you?

Barbara

Pilots may face charges in Brazil crash By PETER MUELLO, Associated Press Writer
54 minutes ago



RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Prosecutors could charge two American pilots of an executive jet with manslaughter following the high-altitude collision with a Brazilian jetliner that apparently led to a crash that killed all 155 people aboard, federal police said Wednesday.



Police seized the passports of pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino, both from New York State. The two were not arrested, but cannot leave the country.

Lepore and Paladino were piloting the Brazilian-made Embraer Legacy 600 when it collided with a brand-new Boeing 737-800 above the Amazon rain forest near Peixoto de Azevedo in Mato Grosso state, some 1,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.

Gol airlines Flight 1907 crashed, killing all 155 aboard. The Legacy was damaged, but landed safely at an air force base.

Mato Grosso's acting federal police director, Geraldo Pereira, said the Federal Prosecutor's Office had ordered an investigation into "the possible commission of a crime."

"We will start investigating if the two pilots caused the accident and if they are considered guilty, they could be charged with involuntary manslaughter," Pereira said.

Lepore and Paladino underwent questioning and routine physical tests in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday and did not talk to journalists.

Mato Grosso state prosecutor Adriano Roberto Alves wants to question the two, as well as air controllers and other passengers of the Legacy, his press office said Wednesday.

It said Alves will rely on police investigations to decide whether criminal charges will be filed.

The air force said both jets were equipped with a modern traffic collision avoidance system, which monitors other planes and sets off an alarm if they get too close.

But Pereira said the Legacy's transponder, which automatically transmits electronic signals that communicate a plane's location, may not have been operating.

"Preliminary investigations indicate that the pilots may have turned off the transponder, that they knew the risks they were running and nevertheless they took certain attitudes that endangered the lives of people," he said.

Judge Tiago Souza Nogueira de Abreu, who ordered the investigation, told the government news service Agencia Brasil that "the hypothesis of a failure by the crew is not discarded."

Officials have told local news media that air traffic controllers had ordered the jetliner to maintain an altitude of 37,000 feet while the Legacy was supposed to be at 36,000 feet.

U.S. journalist Joe Sharkey, who was on the Legacy, wrote in the New York Times that shortly before the crash, he saw an altitude display reading 37,000 feet.

The Legacy was making its inaugural flight from the southern Brazilian city of Sao Jose dos Campos to the United States, where it had been purchased by ExcelAire Service Inc., based in Long Island, New York.

The company "has never been involved in an accident since its founding in 1985," ExcelAire spokeswoman Lisa Hendrickson said by phone on Wednesday. "Both pilots were captain-qualified to fly the Legacy."

Hendrickson told the newspaper Newsday that Lepore, a commercial pilot for more than 20 years from Bay Shore, N.Y., had logged more than 8,000 hours of flight time while Paladino, of Westhampton Beach, N.Y., has more than 6,400 hours of flight time and has been a commercial pilot for a decade, she said.

Four U.S. experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board arrived in Brazil to help with the investigation, the National Civil Aviation Agency said Wednesday. Observers from Boeing and Embraer also were taking part.

Among those killed in the crash of the Gol jet was U.S. citizen Douglas Hancock, 35, of Missouri. He was in Mato Grosso for business and was returning to Rio de Janeiro where he lived, his father, Paul Hancock, told the Southeast Missourian newspaper.

___

AP writer Stan Lehman in Sao Paulo contributed to this story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061005/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/brazil_plane_crash

Blame on air traffic controllers in jet's crash angers Brazilians

They worry that U.S. will attempt to shield 2 American pilots whose plane clipped the airliner

RIO DE JANEIRO - For some Brazilians, the airplane crash that killed 154 people late last month is no longer just a national tragedy. It now threatens to become an issue of national sovereignty.

Many Brazilians suspect blame for the crash lies with two Americans, pilots of a private plane that clipped a Brazilian jetliner in the Amazon skies and sent it plummeting.

While Brazilians promise to wait for investigators to detail the full story, they express worry that the United States will try to protect its citizens by putting them above their laws.

"The people are indignant. They want to see justice," said Tadeu Catherino, a television set designer in Rio de Janeiro.

In an online forum on the Web site of the Rio daily newspaper O Globo, or in follow-up interviews with the Tribune, Catherino and others said their grief over the plane crash is now joined by anger and frustration.

They said supporters of the American pilots were too quick to blame Brazilian air traffic controllers for the crash. They defended a Brazilian judge's order that the pilots remain in Brazil during the investigation.

And they said that if the American pilots are proved to have erred "” for example, by diverting from their flight plan and flying at the wrong altitude "” they should be held accountable in Brazilian courts.

The two men at the heart of the investigation, and at the center of the growing controversy, are New Yorkers Joseph Lepore, 42, and Jan Paladino, 34.

On Sept. 29, they were piloting an Embraer Legacy 600 that had just been purchased by

ExcelAire, flying north over the Amazon at 37,000 feet. That put them on a collision course with a Boeing 737 operated by Gol Airlines.

When the two planes passed, the winglet and horizontal stabilizer bar of the Legacy clipped some part of the Boeing, investigators said. The part was critical enough to doom the Boeing, and the passenger jet nose-dived toward the ground, spinning as it fell for more than 2 1/2 minutes and breaking into pieces shortly before impact.

So fast did the impact happen that the pilots and five others aboard the Legacy literally did not know what hit them. Only after they landed, with difficulty, a harrowing half-hour later at a Brazilian military base did they find out the truth.

Brazil Official: U.S. Pilots Irresponsible

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Brazil's defense minister said two American pilots were "irresponsible" in claiming they were at the correct altitude when their plane collided with a Gol airlines Boeing 737-800 and apparently caused it to crash, killing all 154 people.

Authorities are investigating why the pilots were flying the Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet at 37,000 feet, an altitude reserved for planes going in the opposite direction at the time of the crash _ Brazil's worst air disaster.

"It was a frivolous statement ... It was irresponsible," Waldir Pires said of the pilots' claim. "The flight plan says that the (planes) should fly on even-number levels."

On an interview with Globo TV aired Tuesday, Pires balked at any suggestion that errors by Brazilian air traffic controllers led to the crash.

Pilots Joseph Lepore, of Bay Shore, New York, and Jan Paladino, of Westhampton Beach, New York, told Mato Grosso state police that they were only following the flight plan when their jet collided with the Boeing over the Amazon rainforest on Sept. 29.

The Boeing crashed into the jungle while the Legacy, which was on its maiden flight to U.S. purchaser ExcelAire Service Inc., landed safely at a Brazilian military base with none of the seven people aboard harmed.

On Tuesday, Edimara Fagundes, spokeswoman for the Mato Grosso Civil Police, said that the pilots' statements contradicted the flight plan obtained from the plane's Brazilian manufacturer and that investigators would seek to interview the two pilots again.

Brazilian authorities seized the passports of the Legacy pilots to prevent them from leaving the country. While they have not been arrested, the pilots remain holed up in a Rio de Janeiro hotel until the investigation is complete.

Fagundes said the flight plan shows the Legacy was to fly at 37,000 feet from the southern city of Sao Jose dos Campos until it changed course over the nation's central capital of Brasilia.

At that point, the plane turned northwest should have dropped to 36,000 feet. After flying another 310 miles, the flight plan said the plane should have risen to 38,000 feet.

But the pilots told investigators they lost contact with air traffic controllers after Brasilia and stuck to the altitude of 37,000 feet, where the collision apparently occurred.

Brazilian authorities have suggested the pilots may have turned off the executive jet's transponder, which transmits the aircraft's location and is used to warn other jets equipped with anti-collision devices that it is nearby. Both planes had anti-collision equipment on board.

The American pilots have repeatedly denied they turned off the device and said they did nothing wrong.

Aviation debate centers on use of criminal probes

By Alan Levin, USA TODAY

Two U.S. charter pilots being held in Brazil following a fatal midair collision over the Amazon jungle are at the forefront of the latest debate over whether members of flight crews should face criminal charges in jet crashes, aviation experts said Tuesday.

Authorities in Brazil are trying to determine why a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 and a Embraer Legacy 600 corporate jet collided at 37,000 feet on Sept. 29, sending the Gol jet plunging to the ground. All 154 people aboard the large jet died, but the pilots of the corporate jet with seven people on board managed to land at a military base.

The pilots, Joseph Lepore, 42, of Bay Shore, N.Y., and Jan Paladino, 34, of Westhampton Beach, N.Y., are being held in a Rio de Janeiro hotel. The local acting federal police director, Geraldo Pereira, said last week that the pilots were not under arrest but could face charges of involuntary manslaughter.

Lepore and Paladino work for the New York charter company ExcelAire.

The main question investigators seem to be focusing on is why the two jets were flying at the same altitude; flight rules are designed to keep jets at different altitudes when flying near each other.

Criminal investigations after an accident are part of "an increasing and alarming trend," said William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, a safety group. "This tends to get in the way of the safety investigation, whose purpose is to find the causes and prevent future tragedies," Voss said.

"There is nothing like the threat of criminal charges to put a chill on an accident investigation," said Peter Goelz, former managing director of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

The NTSB determines the "probable cause" of accidents, but steers away from criminal cases or civil lawsuits. Groups such as the Flight Safety Foundation say that punishing individuals for mistakes does not help prevent accidents.

Among the recent criminal cases:

"¢ Two retired airline executives, an Airbus official, a retired French aviation official and an air traffic controller face charges of negligent homicide in connection with a 1992 crash of a jet in Strasbourg, France.

"¢ Charges were brought this year against eight air traffic officials for their roles in a 2002 midair crash in Swiss-controlled airspace above Germany that killed 71 people. The controller who issued the command that led to the crash, Peter Nielsen, was later stabbed to death by the father of one of the victims.

"¢ Five aviation officials were convicted of manslaughter for their roles in a 2001 crash that killed 118 people on two jets that collided on the ground in Milan. The convictions were upheld in July.

A lawyer for the two pilots in the Brazil crash, Jose Carlos Dias, issued a statement saying they are "confident that they acted appropriately." Calls to the Brazilian Embassy in Washington were not returned.

Thanks for the article, CD. It will be interesting to read the outcome of this.

Barbara