News: LI Pilots Sentenced for Brazilian Plane Crash
(Long Island, N.Y.) Two Long Island pilots have been sentenced to four years of community service after the small plane they were operating collided with a Boeing 737, which soon crashed and killed over one hundred and fifty passengers. There were no survivors from the larger aircraft, but all seven aboard the Long Island plane lived. Though the incident occurred in 2006, a legal battle has been ensuing for years between the pilots’ defenses and Brazilian authorities.
The September 29th, 2006 plane crash over the Amazon jungle was considered one of Brazil’s deadliest airline collisions. The sentencing came this past Monday when a Brazilian Federal Judge made a decision concerning the Bay Shore and Westhampton Beach pilots. While Brazilian prosecutors accused the pilots of being negligent for not checking the status of their anti-collision equipment, the pilots insisted on their innocence.
Some reports stated that the pilots were accused of not checking equipment and a locator for the period of an hour, which is considered a long length of time in aviation. They were also accused of turning off their transponders and not following instructions given to them by Brazilian authorities. More accusations included that they didn’t follow their route, and that they flew at 37,000 feet when the standard and mandatory altitude for northbound flights was even-numbered at either 36,000 or 38,000 feet.
The manufacturer of the transponder was also investigated, while passengers on the plane challenged the accusations made by Brazilian authorities. They claimed that the notoriously faulty Brazilian Air Traffic Control System is to blame, and that flight data and a cockpit voice recording prove the pilots tried to reach controllers at least fifteen times within the half-hour prior to the crash. While a controller was convicted on charges similar to manslaughter in the U.S., Brazilian authorities continued to accuse the pilots of not responding to calls from Air Traffic Control.
The collision occurred at 37,000 feet in the air and the Gol Transportes Aereos Flight 1907 later disintegrated upon crashing. Reports stated that it had been traveling from Manaus to Brasilia and hit the smaller aircraft roughly fifteen minutes before it would have reached its destination. The aircraft lost a wing tip and part of its tail while slowly losing speed and altitude.
Miraculously, the pilots were able to land the damaged plane in an Amazon jungle military base thirty minutes later and a hundred-and-twenty miles from the crash. The plane was an Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet operated by ExcelAire Service Inc. which had bases in Ronkonkoma and both MacArthur and Republic airports. In 2009, a Brazilian prosecutor was denied by a judge after requesting to reinstate negligence claims against the pilots.
One of the surviving passengers was an author who worked for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and had been flying to pursue a freelance assignment for a corporate aviation magazine. He claimed that the collision felt similar to hitting a pothole, and that people onboard saw the shadow of the larger plane. He also said that allegations which accused the pilots of turning off equipment to perform trick maneuvers were ludicrous. The passengers, all uninjured, accepted death after seeing the damaged wing and tail, while the pilots worked meticulously to perform a safe landing.
He also claimed that they didn’t know what had hit them for three hours after the crash occurred at roughly 4pm local time. Many Brazilians took great offense to what they considered leniency for the deaths of over a hundred passengers, who were mostly natives of Brazil. They protested the judge’s decision and labeled the pilots as killers. Others claimed that the Brazilian government had been looking for a scapegoat for an air traffic control system that was compromised despite heavily-financed efforts in renovation, which had also been supported by the testimonies from veteran Brazilian pilots.
