SAO PAULO, Brazil, 19 July 2007 — Rescue workers hunted for bodies in the smoking wreckage of an airliner yesterday after it crashed at Brazil’s busiest airport, killing up to 200 people in the country’s worst air disaster.
The pilot of the airliner that burst into flames after trying to land on a short, rain-slicked runway apparently tried to take off again, barely clearing rush-hour traffic on a major highway.
The runway at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas Airport is known to be dangerously short. Two planes slipped off it in rainy weather just a day earlier. Pilots call it the “aircraft carrier” — so short and surrounded by heavily populated neighborhoods that they’re told to take off again and fly around if they overshoot the first 1,000 feet (305 meters) of runway.
“What appears to have happened is that he (the pilot) didn’t manage to land and he tried to take off again,” said Capt. Marcos, a spokesman for the Sao Paulo Fire Department who would only identify himself by rank and first name in accordance with department guidelines.
The plane — a domestic flight from Porto Alegre — cleared the airport fence and the busy highway, but slammed into a gas station and a TAM airlines building, causing an inferno. Temperatures reached 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,830 Fahrenheit) inside the plane, and officials said there was no way passengers could have survived.
“All of a sudden I heard a loud explosion, and the ground beneath my feet shook,” said Elias Rodrigues Jesus, a TAM worker, who was walking nearby when he saw the jet explode. “I looked up and I saw a huge ball of fire, and then I smelled the stench of kerosene and sulfur.”
TAM Linhas Aereas SA said 186 were on the Airbus A320 — 162 passengers, 18 TAM employees and a crew of six — and officials said three bodies of people killed on the ground had been recovered. There were fears of more dead on the ground, with 14 others taken to hospitals, where their conditions were not known.
Emergency workers have so far recovered 128 badly charred bodies, along with the “black box” flight data recorder, said Antonio de Olin, chief of the police station at the Congonhas Airport. He said forensic doctors were gathering information from relatives to help with identifications.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared three days of national mourning for Brazil’s second major air disaster in less than a year. In September, a Gol Aerolinhas Inteligentes SA Boeing 737 and an executive jet collided over the Amazon rain forest, killing 154 people. Yesterday’s crash now replaces that tragedy as Brazil’s worst air disaster. Silva’s government is under increasing pressure to deal with Brazil’s aviation woes. In September, a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 collided with an executive jet over the Amazon rainforest, causing the passenger jet to crash, killing 154 people.
Since then, congressional investigations have raised questions about the country’s underfunded air traffic control systems, deficient radar system and the airlines’ ability to cope with a surge in travelers. Controllers — concerned about being made scapegoats — have engaged in strikes and work slowdowns to raise safety concerns, causing lengthy delays and cancellations.
Presidential spokesman Marcelo Baumbach said it was premature to declare a cause, but critics have warned for years of the danger of such an accident when large planes land in rainy weather at Congonhas Airport, Brazil’s busiest.
In 1996, a TAM Airlines Fokker-100 crashed shortly after taking off from the same airport, killing all 96 people on board and three on the ground. In February, a federal court briefly banned takeoffs and landings of three types of large jets because of safety concerns. An appeals court overruled that, saying the safety concerns weren’t sufficient to outweigh the severe economic ramifications for Brazil.
A320s were not covered under the judge’s ban, and the TAM jet that crashed was a relatively recent model, said William Voss, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia.
“So there are no red flags coming up, it sounds like a straightforward runway overrun,” Voss said.
The single-aisle, twin-engine plane, delivered in 1998, had logged about 20,000 flight hours in some 9,300 flights, Airbus said.
