Joe Sharkey At Large

..And thanks for the use of the hall, as they used to say. I finally turn in my wings on the Brazil crash story.

For eight months, I’ve tried, with what I would say is notable success, to report the developing story of the Sept. 29 air crash in detail and with accuracy. Yes, I have been harsh when I thought it necessary. And yes, I have resorted to unseemly ridicule when I thought ridicule was necessary.

But the toll of personal advocacy journalism has finally reached the point where I can’t pay it anymore.

I did this all independently, as a freelance writer, and at a pretty high price.

I owed nothing to no one, except perhaps the honorable Richard Pedicini, an American in Brazil who, on his own, contacted me in November to offer his services translating Portuguese reports and, as time went on, even doing his own reporting on court proceedings and the like.

I’ve known many fine and honest journalists in my life. Mr. Pedicini, whose background is in banking, not journalism, ranks among the finest because his motives were pure and basic: to report what happened, t0 drive at the truth, and to keep at it day in and day out.

Mr. Pedicini, whom I always jocularly referred to here as “our Sao Paulo bureau chief,” was in fact just that. His agenda was and is pure: to get it straight. And he was getting it from Brazil.

I have been called an apologist for ExcelAire and for the accused pilots. That was never, ever true. I just reported the facts as I knew them. Aside from a strictly social occasion, when I was invited to be at the homecoming in Long Island when the pilots were released from Brazil in December, I have not met the pilots since we parted company after the crash in Brazil, and I have never been able to interview them back in the U.S. about the crash itself.

I make no excuses for manifest failings in this blog, including failings of tone. There have been no failings in accuracy that I know of.

“You sound too obsessed,” someone said.

I had my reasons.

This has been my show from day one; my own way of dealing with what happened to me, to the rest of us who survived and, most importantly, with the 154 who died. I felt from the beginning that those tragic deaths were cynically exploited by the Brazilian authorities in what I will always regard as an odious attempt to shift blame away from the real problem — an infamously unsafe and badly maintained air-traffic control system — and onto the Americans as scapegoats.

If I had to employ images of the Keystone Kops and Three Stooges to underscore my point, so be it. So they were rude. They also were funny. Ridicule has its purposes.

There was never profit or benefit here for me. Far from it. I grossly neglected doing paying work to do this, and for the most part it was misery — which I suppose is a form of therapy.

I’m want no medals. They gave me a one in Vietnam. That and $2.99 will get me a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

But my Brazil posts on this eccentric blog do hold up, and they’ll stand up years from now, as accurate and honest journalism that was done at a time, on the run, when no one in the mainstream press was interested in getting involved. For those of you who might be interested, I’m going to put all of the Brazil stuff in a separate archive linked to from this blog.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, we’re back to nonsense. The aerial maneuvers! Have I singlehandedly revived Whac-a-Mole as a metaphor? It goes on and on.

But I cannot.

Thanks again to Richard. Thanks to dozens of other sources, including investigators and Brazilian officials who could not be named. And thanks to the dozens of international pilots who tuned in, and got it, and turned me in the right direction when I my heading was off.

And thanks and lifelong affection to the other six of the Amazon Seven. That was one hell of a trip, guys. We probably shoulda gone to Atlantic City instead.

The rest is up to the mainstream press, which can afford to pay the price if it wants to invest the effort. Because this story is very far from over.

But for me, it’s over and out.

Joe Sharkey At Large now becomes a general travel blog, as it was originally meant to be before Sept. 29, 2006.

–end

There are something like five official investigations still underway in Brazil, even though the American pilots were indicted on May 25, and a judge last Friday ordered the criminal pre-trial proceedings to commence. You know, first we hang ‘em, then we ask questions.

Later this week, I’ll catch up on some of the latest shenanigans, and explore more fully the fact that the asinine “aerial stunt maneuvers” charge has arisen zombie-like from the Graveyard of Crazed Delusions.

Today, a top official of Embraer was heard from at one of the hearings, this one in congress. According to news accounts, he had some amazing things to say, as you’ll see.

Embraer is the manufacturer of the brand new $24.7 million Legacy 600 business jet that was put into a horrific mid-air collision with a commercial Gol 737 after a series of technical and personnel breakdowns in Brazil’s military-run and notoriously faulty air-traffic control system.

Till recently, Embraer has been conspicuously unheard from, perhaps because Embraer has not been named as a defendant in various civil lawsuits seeking many millions of dollars in damages from the two American pilots, their employer ExcelAire Service, and Honeywell Aerospace, which manufactured the Legacy’s transponder unit.

Those of you (may the peace and blessings of God be upon you) who have carefully followed these long blogs on this subject over the last 8-plus months know that in April, ExcelAire filed with the Federal Police a very detailed report (here’s the link again) that showed how air-traffic control breakdowns caused the accident and also raised very serious questions about the manufacture, installation and history of the transponder equipment in the new Legacy.

ExcelAire said it was not informed of previous trouble with the transponder equipment installed in the Legacy before taking delivery of it. The facts in that report have not been disputed. And to my knowledge, Embraer has not disputed, or even addressed, the assertions about the equipment installed in the Legacy 600 ExcelAire took delivery of on Sept. 29, hours before the crash. Here’s a summary from the section in the ExcelAire report that covers the equipment:

Now, remember, until the Keystone Kops recently opened a new circus with the indictment of the pilots and of four controllers, and the Three Stooges classic “Disorder in the Court” flashed to mind, two major points of agreement had been reached down here on earth, which includes in Brazil:

– That a series of technological and human errors in Brazilian air traffic control had placed the two oncoming aircraft on a collision course at 37,000 feet, and that air traffic controllers at the center in whose space the crash occurred were aware of the lack of reception of a signal from the Legacy for 55 minutes before the collision, and had done nothing about it. The Legacy pilots, in turn, expressed no awareness of a transponder problem before the crash.

– That the American pilots, whatever their share, if any, in the blame, did not deliberately turn off the transponder on the Legacy — an act that would have been certifiably insane in air-space that was well known (and ultimately the Brazilian authorities finally admitted this, too) for having dangerous radio and radar blind spots and dead zones.

The Federal Police indictment, in fact, specifically acknowledges the blind zones, and charges the pilots with a crime that was “unintentional. It also charges three air-traffic controllers with unintentional crimes and a fourth — the one who was at the screen supposedly monitoring the Legacy — with an intentional crime.

Hate to keep walking you down Memory Lane, but you might recall that early on in this matter, knuckleheads like the Brazilian Defense Minister, Wonderful Waldir Pires, had spoken openly of their belief that the American pilots deliberately disabled the transponder. The reason for this wild act? To hide from air-traffic controllers the fact that they were doing aerial stunts over the Amazon — loop d loops and the like — to show off the new plane.

It has been intimated, furthermore, that one of the reasons for putting the beautiful new plane through these wild stunts over the mighty Amazon would have been to show it off to me, a working-stiff reporter, hitchhiking a ride on board, who often writes about business jets.

Now, as I have said, if the pilots — whom I had only met two days earlier in San Jose dos Campos — had been doing illegal stunt maneuvers or otherwise flying recklessly when we collided with an airliner that went down with 154 aboard, that would have been one hell of a story for me:

Business-Jet Pilots Flew Aerial Stunts,
And 154 Plunged to Death in Amazon

An Eyewitness Account

Yet I conspicuously failed to mention that in my actual front-page story on the crash, and in a subsequent 4,000-word magazine article — in two of the most influential newspapers in the world. … What could explain even the dimmest reporter overlooking that shocking fact? … Oh, I forgot: I had to have been in on the fix. I thought that lunatic charge had been belly-laughed off Planet Earth six months ago, but the game of Whac-a-Mole never ends in official Brazil. Months after it was pounded down into its hole, that maniacal critter has popped up again from another hole.

More on this later this week. But it has recently been reported again in Brazil that the seven of us who survived the crash conspired to concoct a cover story. The proof of that is that in interrogations by the Air Force at the jungle air base where we spent 24 hours, and during a subsequent all-night series of interrogations at a Federal Police headquarters in Cuiaba, we all told exactly the same story about what happened!

Apparently, it seems we began concocting our story immediately after our plane fell out of the sky and skidded, tires and brakes shrieking and smoking, to a crash-landing on an obscure jungle military air strip, with a broken-off wing, a busted tail stabilizer, and a disabled hydraulics system.

Now, it’s well established that air-traffic control had long since lost track of us, and the Cachimbo air base’s sleepy control tower only lumbered to life as we were falling out of the sky onto them. So one might think that the Brazilian air force would have (quite reasonably) considered this a somewhat alarming and rude intrusion, and responded accordingly. (Which they actually did, immediately surrounding the plane with armed military personnel).

But, according to a recent story in one dark corner of the Brazilian media — you know, that place where the people who don’t take their meds have to sit — we seven brazen Americans refused to get off the plane for 50 minutes, despite being surrounded by very put-out troops with guns. For 50 minutes, we supposedly sat there inventing our cover story, while awaiting an American jet from Brasilia that would deliver a U.S. consul to the scene to protect us. Only then, supposedly, did we get off the plane.

If this were true, I would concede without hesitation that the Brazilian air force would have had very good reason to shoot the lot of us, Consul included.

Employing the logic favored by the Brazilian authorities, then, I would argue that the fact that they did not shoot us for defying them for 50 minutes in an airplane that had just crashed on their base is proof that the story is, of course, a lie.

Actually, as you can well imagine, the minute that plane stopped as we held our breath wondering if it was going to blow up, we rushed off the plane onto that fetid jungle base and practically embraced the astonished troops, who looked at us like we were outer space aliens.

I mean, they knew even less than we did. And all we knew was that we’d been in a collision with something, obviously, but we didn’t know what it was until about three hours after our emergency landing.

And we didn’t see a U.S. consulate representative until well over 24 hours later, when we were transferred to the police headquarters in Cuiaba. And a fat lot of good he did.

From today, as translated by our Sao Paulo bureau chief, Richard Pedicini, a report on Embraer’s long-awaited entrance into the … uh .. deliberations. (The “CPI” refers to one of two congressional investigative committees looking into the crash, along with other agencies): click here

In deposition to the House Aviation Blackout CPI, the president of Embraer, Frederico Fleury Curado, indirectly blamed the Legacy pilots, Joe Lepore and Jean Paul Paladino, for the accident which killed 154 passengers of the Gol Boeing 1907 in September of last year.

Curado affirmed that, in accordance with the top civil aviation regulatory body in the United States, certainly the transponder of the Embraer-made jet was turned off at the moment of the accident, but there was no failure of the equipment.

Questioned by the CPI’s report referee, congressman Marco Maia (PT-RS), about the possibility of the pilots having bumped into some button and turned off the transponder by accident, Frederico Curado said that this is improbable.

“The possibility exists, but I would say that it’s improbably because to turn it off it’s necessary to push two buttons, which is not something that can happen by chance”, he explained.

He added, further, that the Embraer functionary [My note: there actually were two Embraer employees on the flight as a routine matter. One was going to return to Sao Jose after our planned one-night stopover at the Amazon River port city of Manaus. The other lives in southern Florida, where we were to have made entry into the U.S. for refueling and for Customs, and continued on to Long Island where ExcelAire is based) who was present on the flight could not have instructed the pilots to turn off the equipment to “test” the plane because “he doesn’t have knowledge or experience to do that”. Thus, the only remaining possibility would be that Lepore and Paladino voluntarily turned off the transponder.

And here’s another report:

One day after a federal court in forlorn Sinop in Mato Grosso state rubber-stamped the Federal Police May 25 indictment of the American pilots, while ruling that the pilots could not be permitted to give their testimony in the United States, Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that the Americans cannot be compelled to testify in Brazil before congressional committees investigating the Sept. 29 disaster and the subsequent systemwide work protests by air-traffic controllers.

Note that the bizarre game of Whac-a-Mole continues. Up again pops the long-since-dispensed-with nonsense about not following a filed flight plan that
everybody involved long ago conceded was overruled by air traffic control, as flight plans routinely are overruled by air traffic control based on real-time conditions.

Also, note the reiteration of an asinine charge — that the cockpit voice-recorder tape shows that the pilots “did not know how to operate some equipment in the plane” — the implication being that they did not know how to operate the transponder.

In fact, it is NOT IN DISPUTE that the cockpit voice-recorder segment in which pilots Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino discussed confusion about operating “some equipment” illustrates merely a brief discussion in which the two pilots were casually trying to figure out how to turn on “Airshow.” Airshow is an in-flight cabin entertainment system that depicts a map showing the plane’s real-time location and other information such as airspeed and estimated on-time arrival on video screens in the passenger cabin.

Airshow, as anyone with intelligence of a turnip knows, has as much to do with flying an aircraft as an in-flight magazine does.

By now, I’m convinced that this constant re-raising of issues that have long-since been explained or dismissed as absurd has to be part of a coordinated, multi-agency plan to scapegoat the pilots — evidence and common sense be damned. As I said from day one, the fix is in.

And as Charles DeGaulle once supposedly said, “Brazil is not a serious country.”

Anyway, from today’s Brazzil.com:

“Ellen Gracie Northfleet, the chief of the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF), told the president and the reporter of the Air Blackout Congressional Inquiry, House representatives Marcelo Castro and Marco Maia, that Brazil’s Justice has no means to compel Americans Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, the pilots of the Legacy executive jet, which collided with the Boeing 737 last September, to travel to Brazil to testify before the congressional committee.

The collision led to Brazil’s worst air accident ever, which caused the death of the 154 passengers and crew aboard the plane when the Boeing fell in the Amazon jungle. The two pilots and the five passengers aboard the little jet were spared and were able to land safely in a Brazilian Air Force base airport.

The congressional inquiry is probing not only the Boeing tragedy but also the whole Brazilian air transportation system, which went into a state of chaos in several occasions since the plane accident over the Amazon.

According to Northfleet, who is the grand-daughter of an American confederate soldier who went to Brazil after the US Civil War, the cooperation agreement on penal matters between Brazil and the United States doesn’t give the congressional committee the right to summon Americans to testify in Brazil.

“This is our main problem at the moment,” complained representative Maia. “From a juridical point of view and from the agreements signed by Brazil with other countries, we have no guarantee that we can indeed hear the pilots.”

The Supreme Chief suggested that the congressmen appeal to the Foreign Ministry of the Brazilian embassy in Washington to convince Lepore and Paladino to travel to Brazil. If everything fails the inquiry committee will try to fly to the US to get the American pilots testimony. Still another option would be to grill them via videoconferencing.

Just last Friday, Brazilian federal judge Murilo Mendes, from Mato Grosso, the state where the Boeing fell down, indicted the two Americans for involuntary manslaughter. Four Brazilian air controllers, all of them Air Force sergeants and all working at Brasília’s air control center, known as Cindacta 1, were also indicted by the same judge.

While three of the flight controllers are being charged with involuntary manslaughter, one of them is being accused of intentional manslaughter.

Judge Mendes determined that the pilots would be interrogated on August 27 and made it clear that they would have to travel to Brazil for that “not being allowed that the act occur at their native country - the United States.”

In the court filing, prosecutor Thiago Lemos de Andrade stated that the negligence of the six men caused the collision between the Legacy and the Boeing. According to the charge, air controller Felipe Santos dos Reis gave wrong instructions to the American pilots, not telling them about the Legacy’s altitude changes.

Jomarcelo Fernandes dos Santos, another air-controller indicted. was responsible for monitoring the area in which the Legacy jet was flying, about one thousand feet above the altitude it should be. Santos is accused of not alerting the US pilots about their wrong altitude.

More than that, the prosecutor says, Santos informed “consciously and willfully” the controller who took over from him that the jet was at 36 thousand feet of altitude feet, when actually it was at 37 thousand feet. Therefore, on the wrong way, since the odd altitude is reserved for planes coming to Brasília and not going from Brasília as it was the case.

Lucivando Tibúrcio de Alencar, the air controller who replaced Santos, was charged for taking too long to attempt a contact with the Legacy - about ten minutes after starting his shift - even though he was aware that the jet’s transponder wasn’t working properly. The last air controller charged was Leandro José Santos de Barros, Alencar’s assistant.

Lepore and Paladino are being charged mainly for their use of the transponder and for not following the written flight plan. The prosecution says that both didn’t know how to use the plane’s equipment and that they ended up turning the transponder off unintentionally.

As the prosecution put it, “For not knowing how to operate some items in the plane, they ended up deactivating by mistake the transponder. To this momentary active ineptitude followed a long omissive negligence.”

The penalty for involuntary manslaughter is from one to three years in jail, but aggravating factors might lead to up to six years in prison. As for willful manslaughter, as one air controller is charged, the penalty can vary from 8 to 24 years of detention.”

My note: The Comments, below, follow the above-referenced post on today’s Brazzil.com.

In the past, the readers’ “Comments” on Brazzil.com about this incident used to include a fair amount of anti-American vitriol, as well as wild denunciations of anything that appeared to conflict with the Official View that the American pilots caused this disaster. It’s probably not good news for Brazilian authorities who are still trying to frame the Americans that, with almost all of the evidence no longer in any dispute, public sentiment in Brazil may have shifted significantly against the authorities transparent lies that the Americans did it. I haven’t fixed punctuation or spelling in the Comments.

(And no, I did not post the first comment, though it reflects my views exactly).

COMMENTS:

Charging the americans…
written by bo, 2007-06-03 11:58:35

–ends

–ends

If you find amusement in the Bancroft family’s tap-dance routine to demonstrate that refusing to sell Dow Jones is all about journalistic principle at $60 a share, but honorably do-able at $65, you might be interested in the next chapter unfolding down the rabbit hole in Brazil.

Dueling representatives of groups of relatives of the 154 people who died when the 737 crashed into the Amazon on Sept. 29 are creating turmoil in the various congressional panels looking into the crash itself, and also investigating the subsequent work protests in which air traffic controllers — citing bad equipment, unsafe work conditions and poor pay and training, and the fear they were going to get blamed for the disaster — virtually shut down Brazil’s air system for days at a time during the months after the Sept. 29 crash.

I mean no disrespect to those who died. When those two planes collided at 37,000 feet over the Amazon, on a collision course they had been put at by a system of errors and breakdowns by air traffic control, 154 children, women and men plunged to horrible, terrifying deaths. I was in a seat over the left wing on the Legacy jet, 10 feet from the point where the planes collided with a horrible bang. Since Sept. 30, there has not been a morning I’ve woken up without that scene in my head, or the thought of those 154 who died when I and six other Americans inexplicably lived.

The Brazilian government, to date, has done virtually nothing to alleviate the suffering of those victims’ relatives, except to say, essentially: Get the Americans!

Thus some of the representatives of the victims’ families share one goal: Easy money. In this case, the way to easy money is pin blame on the Americans, hope to get them convicted of something in Brazil’s criminal courts, and then try the civil lawsuits in the United States. Because, trust me, the Brazilian Defense Department, which employs the military controllers and runs the broken-down air-traffic control system that caused this horrible disaster, isn’t about to voluntarily accept responsibility, let alone cough up cash. Why, that would be an insult to Brazil’s honor!

A report on the family squabbles follows.

But first some housekeeping, as the American news media have rushed half-baked into this story again today under a false alarm.

1. The American pilots were not indicted “yesterday.” As I wrote previously, they were indicted on May 25 (see post from that day) by a Federal Prosecutor in Mato Grosso on a charge of involuntarily exposing an aircraft to danger. There was no grand jury involved, as there would have been in the United States. Rather, the Federal Prosecutor based his indictment on a hastily assembled report by the Federal Police, who have been on occasion referred to in this space as the Keystone Kops.

2. What did happen yesterday was that a federal judge, sitting in a little city called Sinop in Mato Grosso state, rubber-stamped the indictment and, saying he had “no choice,” sent it into the pre-trial system. Sinop was chosen for this action, I am told, because it is a backwater Amazon burg with the geographical distinction of being both a few hundred miles south of the crash site, while being as far away as possible from potentially nettlesome news media in Sao Paulo and Rio.

3. The judge did not “rule” that the pilots are guilty of anything. The judge certified that the collision and deaths occurred, and said that “circumstantial evidence” presented in the Federal Police indictment was “sufficient” to indicate “in theory” that a crime might have occurred, thereby allowing the pre-trial proceedings to commence.

4. Nor did the judge rule that the pilots must come to Brazil — by extradition if necessary — to answer charges. Rather, he ruled that it would not be acceptable for them to answer charges in the United States. This point will become very important as the trial preparations proceed, and the opinion of a single judge in a forlorn city in Mato Grosso is not writ in stone. But presuming extradition does not apply — and the pilots’ lawyers insist the charge of involuntarily exposing an aircraft to danger is not extraditable under treaties between the United States and Brazil — the pilots have the option of simply not going to Brazil to answer charges.

Honestly, folks, I have been doing my level best to keep you informed on the admittedly complex nuances of this story since early October.

But it’s like that Boardwalk/arcade game “Whac-a-Mole,” in which you use a mallet to knock a critter back down its hole, but up it pops from another hole, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. (Here is a video-game version called Whack-a-Mole.) I mean, we’re even back to some nitwits down there repeating that that the American pilots were performing illegal “aerial stunts” when the crash occurred.

Anyway, onto the Family Feuds. The CPIs are the various investigative panels in congress. And don’t ask why the Gol cereal snack bars have suddenly become a part of the case. Some questions simply do not have answers.

Translation, per usual, by our Sao Paulo bureau chief, Richard Pedicini:

CORREIO BRAZILIENSE

Families split in CPI

Relatives of Flight 1907 passengers argue in House CPI and testimony is suspended.
Congressman asks Gol to change cereal bars

Solano Nascimento
Correio staff

The Chamber of Deputies Aviation Blackout CPI was the stage yesterday of loud arguments, embarrassment, and wasted time. The witness invited to speak in the name of the victims of the accident with the Gol plane in September of last year have his representativity questioned by some of the passengers’ relatives, and the CPI session wound up being interrupted.

Jorge André Cavalcanti, president of the Association of Families and Friends of Victims of Gol Flight 1907, was invited to testify at 1:00 PM. The night before, the first sign of alert: the CPI’s report referee, Marco Maia (PT-RS), received a document with more than 100 signatures affirming that Cavalcanti did not speak in the name of the victims.

Yesterday, at the start of his deposition, Maia made reference to the questionings and asked how many families the association represented. Cavalcanti responded that the entity had 35 relatives of victims as members. Maia continued with the questioning - since not only on the petition but in the association’s documents as well there are more than one relative of the same victim - , and then Cavalcanti recognized that the entity represented about 18 families. As the accident left 154 dead, there was no need for a calculator so know that Cavalcanti did not speak in the name of the majority of the relatives of passengers.

While these questionings were going on, Eulália Machado de Carvalho, who lost her husband in the accident and was listening to the session, yelled that she was leaving. “He doesn’t represent anyone”, she said. “I am not going to stay in this circus, no, I’m going to leave”.

With such much controversy, a little more than an hour after the testimony began and before the majority of the CPI members asked questions, congressman Eduardo Cunha (PMDB-RJ) suggested the suspension of the session for in order to arrange, on some other day, a public audience with the presence of several victims’ relatives. In the deposition which he gave in the morning, Constantino de Oliveira Júnior, president of Gol, affirmed that the company did not negotiate with the association of relatives of passengers who died. “Contact is made directly with the relatives of the victims.”

At the end of the afternoon, another frustration for the CPI. Members of the commission met with the chief justice, Ellen Gracie, to see if the Supreme Court could oblige the pilots of the Legacy which collided with the Gol plane to testify. She explained that the Court could not intervene, and suggested that the Congressmen try other paths through the ministries of Justice and Foreign Relations.

During the morning, part of the time of Constantino Júnior’s testimony was spent by legislators defining how to refer to last September’s accident and to discuss the possibility of the company changing the cereal bars it supplies on flights. Vic Pires Franco (DEM-Pará), after telling a long story about the difficulty he had trying to find a cheap ticket for his daughter’s boyfriend, questioned the president of Gol about the snacks served by the company: “It’s just cereal bars? Can it be that you cannot change your philosophy?”

Without hiding a certain discomfort, Constantino responded: “We haven’t found another product that is good and non-perishable”. Vic Pires suggested then that Gol adopt bars of cupuaçu — a typical fruit of his state. Despite dealing with a tragic event, the other member of the the CPI did not share the businessman’s discomfort, and laughed at their colleague’s jokes.

–ends

American pilots
Joe Lepore (l) and
Jan Paladino

From our Sao Paulo bureau chief Richard Pedicini

Mato Grosso court accepts indictment against Legacy pilots and air traffic controllers in Gol accident

01/06 - 18:15 - Newsroom

The single court in Sinop (Mato Grosso) accepted the indictment returned by the Federal Prosecutors’ Office (MPF) referring to the tragedy of Gol Flight 1907. On May 26, the two pilots of the Legacy jet and four air traffic controllers were indicted by the MPF. All should respond in Federal Court for exposing an aircraft to danger, a crime foreseen in Article 261 of the Criminal Code.On September 29, 2006, the Gol Airlines plane was making flight 1907, from Manaus (AM) to Brasília (DF). At the same time the Legacy jet was coming from São José dos Campos (SP) toward Manaus, where it would land to, the next day, leave for overseas.At 37,000 feet, in the northern region of Mato Grosso, near the town of Peixoto de Azevedo, the tip of the jet’s left wing collided with the Gol Boeing provoking damages which caused the destabilization and crash of the plane. The 154 people aboard the Boeing died..

According to the Federal Court in Mato Grosso, Legacy jet pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino and air traffic controllers Lucivando Tibúrcio de Alencar, Leandro José Santos de Barros and Felipe Santos Reis should be tried by the court for unintentional crimes. The fourth accused, Jomarcelo Fernandes dos Santos, should be tried for intentional crime. All the air traffic controllers are Air Force sergeants serving at Cindacta 1, in Brasilia.

According to the indictment, Jomarcelo practiced conduct characterized as intentional for being conscious that the Legacy aircraft was at an incompatible flight level for the route that it was undertaking.

Over the indictment against the flight controllers, the prosecutor explained that he understood it to be in the MPF’s jurisdiction to offer an indictment because there were no crimes with these characteristics foreseen in the Military Criminal Code.

***
Response from Joel R. Weiss, attorney for the American pilots in Long Island:

“The Judge’s decision today has nothing to do with guilt or innocence, but relates solely to whether the allegations of the Complaint by the Prosecutor justify this case being heard by the court. In fact, the allegations against the pilots are inaccurate, and the pilots are innocent.

“The pilots’ conduct was completely competent throughout the flight and cannot be fairly characterized as criminal. Sadly, a hastily constructed criminal charge was put ahead of an impartial air safety investigation. The fact is that air-traffic control placed and approved these two aircraft on a collision course, on the same airway, and altitude traveling toward each other. That is the overwhelming, obvious root cause of this accident. We will vigorously defend the pilots against these charges, and they will be vindicated.”

–ends

One of the problems with the transparency inherent in maintaining a blog is that your spouse can check in during the day — she works in New York, I work at home when I’m not traveling — and see that you’re screwing around online. Blogging, while amusing and occasionally enlightening, does not actually pay cash money, you see.

And so I have to rush this one in and get back to work, having just received the expected phone call about the evidence already on hand for today.

“Don’t you have a book proposal to complete by this weekend?” she said.

I do. I do.

But I forgot about promoting the musical revue by Rene Foss, a flight attendant who’s become a friend of mine over the years. Rene and company have been doing the revue, “Around the World in a Bad Mood,” for years, much to the delight of flight attendants and others who understand the madness of air travel. (She also wrote a book with the same title about the fun and foibles of flight-attending) Here’s her Web site.

That’s her, in the calendar cover above, fifth from the left. The gag calendar features flight attendants of all ages in cheesecake (not nude) poses. She’s Miss January. It’s published by flight attendants who use it to underscore the fact, while airlines regain profitability, flight crews have been subject to years of salary cuts and pension hits. You can see more of the calendar and order one here.

Meanwhile, Ms. Foss is taking a few weeks off this month to bring the revue — which plays cabarets and theater fringe festivals all over the country — back to Manhattan.

For the New York performances, in June, here’s the schedule and information

Also, the revue is running Sept. 7, 14 and 24, same place, but at 7 p.m.

—ends

Below: Parody from the Onion

Among my many complaints about the fatuous gasbags who can be found everywhere these days ruminating on The Media is that — most of them never having actually worked in a newsroom — they increasingly pontificate on the idea that all news must be delivered immediately. One lamentable result is you get half-baked stories rushed online and onto the airways even by respectable news organizations because reporters are expected to be “immediate,” which means wasting valuable reporting time in a desperate rush to get something online that could maybe benefit from a little more legwork and thought.

One particularly god-awful Gannett newspaper (yeah, I know that’s an oxymoron), the News-Press of Fort Myers, Fla., even has its reporters carrying around video cameras, so they can pull off the road and rush that breathless report on the new Target opening to a waiting public. The poor devils also have to carry WiFi laptops so they can send stories right from their cars, thus instantly satisfying ostensibly insatiable demand for what the editor calls “really local news.”

The paper also has a cadre of what it calls “volunteer citizen journalists” (in Gannett happy talk, of course, that means “We don’t have to pay them”). Of course they have a cute name for them as well: “Team Watchdog.” Whoooooo.

Please don’t get me started on “local” news. All right, I’m started.

Nearly 30 years ago, I worked for a newspaper, the once-mighty and now defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, that listened to some crackpot media consultant in the late 1970s and broke the paper up into multiple “zoned” suburban editions in which international, national and even regional news was demoted in favor of “really local” news.

As circulation plunged, the same geniuses who’d squeezed important news out of the paper decided to create a special New Jersey edition, in which Philadelphia news — you know, the real news from the nearby big city with the crazy mayor and all the cultural institutions — was practically banned, and in which the front page consisted almost entirely of stories from suburban New Jersey communities.

My father, who then lived in New Jersey and had been a Bulletin subscriber since the 1940s, promptly canceled his subscription. “What the hell do I care about Haddonfield?” he said.

The Bulletin died in 1982, and the gasbags called it a victim of fierce competition. I called it a suicide.

You know what “really local” news is on the block where my wife and I live?

Well, the guy across the street, a good soul whom I call Jingle Bells because of his extravagant front-lawn Christmas decorations, puts his lavish Easter display up a week earlier than usual. Talk ensues. What could this portend — the festive July 4 decorations going up on Memorial Day?

You know what the top story in the 23 years we’ve lived here was?

About 15 years ago, a big sycamore tree across the street just fell down all by itself. No lightening strike, no collision with a car. The damn thing just up and toppled into the street without as much as a fare thee well.

Oh yes, this just in: A very nice man named Jose is painting our house and doing a very good job at it, too. There’s talk about his pace, though, because Jose works slowly and meticulously. This morning, someone asked me when “Speedy Gonzalez” would be finished, which I think qualified as a possible hate crime. Hang on 24 seconds while I phone that in to the local paper.

Anyway, I’m glad I’m long gone from being a daily news reporter. Used to be, you’d go out on a story, spend the time to sort it out and get it right, and then come back to the office to write it and then be tortured by editors. But by 6 a.m. the next morning, readers usually had a pretty solid report.

Trust me, news moguls of America: On most stories (truly breaking major news aside), I as a consumer can wait till the next morning to get myself informed — after reporting, editing and evaluation for placement are done.

Which is why this satire from the Onion strikes home.

Incidentally, I assume the quote from the worthy professor at the Rutgers University Center for Media Studies is a faux one. But imagine: there actually is something called the Rutgers University center for “media studies.” Rutgers! Warning: Don’t light a match in that joint!

But I digress. There’s actual paid work to be done. And it can’t be done in 24 seconds, not at these rates.

–ends

I was apparently misinformed the other day when I said that relatives of the victims of the 154 people who died in the Sept. 29 mid-air collision were positive in their reviews of a Discovery Channel Brazil documentary/dramatization that will be shown on Brazilian television next week.

Evidently, some who were given an advance screening were very displeased because, they said, the program shows that air traffic control was at fault and fails to blame the American pilots. The relatives and their representatives have been adamant in insisting (absurdly) that the Americans were the chief culprits in the disaster. The relatives have said they might seek action to block the showing of the program, but our Sao Paulo bureau chief, Richard Pedicini, says that prior restraint in this matter is highly unlikely.

Mr. Pedicini, listened to the audio broadcast of a congressional panel’s interview with Jorge Andre Cavalcante and others who represent some relatives of some of the victims. Victims families have sued the pilots and their employer ExcelAir, the Long Island charter company that had just purchased the Legacy 600 that collided with the Gol 737 after a series of catastrophic system breakdowns and human errors in Brazilian air traffic control put the two aircraft on a head-on course at 37,000 feet over the Amazon.

Mr. Pedicini reports: (the links below are from the congressional hearing and are in Portuguese. To hear the testimony (in Portuguese), you need to click on the box to the left of the name)

All audio CPI, index:
http://www2.camara.gov.br/comissoes/temporarias53/cpi/cpiaereo/reunioes.html

Audio of Constantino and Cavalcante at CPI.

http://imagem.camara.gov.br/internet/audio/Resultado.asp?txtCodigo=00009940

Below links go to roughly same article. Have translated extract only.

http://www.24horasnews.com.br/index.php?mat=218690

http://www.diariodecuiaba.com.br/detalhe.php?cod=287393

RELATIVES – For the documentary launching, which occurred yesterday in São Paulo, the channel invited two representatives of the victims’ relatives. The reactions were not exactly of satisfaction regarding the content.

For the president of the Association of Relatives of the Victims of the Gol Accident, Jorge André Cavalcante, there were stretches that were “biased”, favorable to the defense of the Legacy pilots, the North Americans Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino.

“It appears to me that the blame for what occurred stayed only in Brazil, with the air traffic controllers. They erred, but the North American pilots also erred on turning off the anti-collision system”, Cavalcante said, also according to G1.

Another member of the association, Neusa Filipeto Machado, was more severe. “The documentary showed the Legacy pilots as heroes. There’s nothing heroic about them, they were irresponsible and imprudent”, she said, at the end of the session.

Relatives who did not take part in the launching threatened to impede the showing of the program, in case all the families don’t have prior access to the content. The Diaro’s reporters sought the Discovery channel’s press officers by email, without a response.

My note: As I have said till we’re all blue in the face, there has been no evidence produced that the pilots turned off the transponder, either intentionally (which would have been insane) or even inadvertently (which could be possible, but hasn’t been shown to be the case). There is an assertion — discussed in detail in a section of the lengthy and crucial report ExcelAire filed in April with the Federal Police — that the transponder equipment installed in the new Legacy has previously failed and was repaired, without ExcelAire being aware of it at purchase. Whatever, the transponder issue is the least important in a chain of events that led to the accident.

–end