I’ve been traveling, and evidently I messed up and failed to copy posts to this site about the Brazil crash news and, alas, about that journalistic atrocity of an article about the crash by William Langewiesche in the January Vanity Fair. (Everywhere I go, incidentally, people ask me essentially: “WTF? That a–hole never tried to contact you?”
Nope. More on that later, I assure you.
Anyway, here are the updates:
Here’s a link to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board findings on the Brazil crash. (10 pages).
Here’s a link to the Brazilian Air Force report. (Note: It’s long, 266 pages)
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Who you gonna call to investigate a horrible mid-air collision: an internationally respected professional aviation authority such as the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board — or a a group of people who owe their paychecks to the military authority responsible for operating the very air-space in which the accident occurred?
Some news reports today give abundant credence to the 266-page report issued yesterday by the Brazilian Air Force (which runs all air-traffic control in that country). The report, signed by two Air Force generals, naturally finds that the American pilots of a business jet were almost entirely responsible for the tragic mid-air collision over the Amazon that killed 154 on a 737 Brazilian airliner on Sept. 29, 2006.
(The New York Times story today puts the issue into proper context. Here’s a link. Newsday also gets it right. The AP, of course, does not.)
The Brazilian report does concede, in a few of its 266 pages, that various, uh, issues with Brazilian air-traffic control may have, uh, been, uh, simultaneously ongoing, uh, concurrent with the occurrence of the, uh, incident.
Off to the races and down the rabbit-hole we go again.
I’ll link to the Brazilian report today.
I’ll also link to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board findings, also issued yesterday.
The NTSB came to a far different conclusion — that the “probable causes” of the accident were systemic errors and specific mistakes in Brazilian air-traffic control, including the fact that the American business jet that collided with the 737 had been ordered to fly at 37,000 feet, on a collision course that went undetected on the ground at air traffic control, for about 50 minutes until the collision.
The NTSB finds that the air-traffic control mistakes were the “probable causes” of the disaster. The NTSB found that the non-functioning transponder and anti-collision system on the Legacy was a “contributing factor.” Neither the Legacy pilots nor the air-traffic controllers (who were supposed to be monitoring the flight) realized that the Legacy transponder wasn’t signaling for about 50 minutes before the collision.
No one has yet come up with anything but a guess to explain how the transponder went off-line, by the way. Was it pilot error? Somehow, with a slip of the foot or hand, did one of the American pilots accidentally turn off the unit? Was it faulty equipment? No one has been able to say.
The Brazilians have basically thrown everything including the kitchen sink into these charges against the American pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, and ExcelAire, the Long Island air-charter company that had just bought the Legacy in Brazil and was ferrying it home when the disaster occurred.
There is another, uh, issue, incidentally. And it involves the Brazilians’ strategic release of the voice recordings from the Legacy cockpit during the entire flight, most notably during the 50 minutes up to the collision and the 25 harrowing minutes afterward as the damaged Legacy was going down, before the pilots spotted a runway gashed into the deep jungle and fought the plane down safely.
Yesterday, the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations released a statement denouncing the leaking of cockpit voice recordings. Such leaked recordings, the international pilots group said, “are being used by a media provider for public entertainment.”
Now, the grandly named International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations (IFALPA) has long been known for its own tradition of elephantine harrumphing, not to mention bureaucratic obfuscation. What in the world are they getting at?
Media accounts noting the IFALPA statement correctly surmised that it addressed what is, in fact, a disgraceful use of cockpit voice recordings — to provide meretricious, cheap dramatic thrills for the paying audience (or readership, with Web site links to the horror) as a plane and its passengers go down in hellish horror.
Incidentally, my own first public comments on this horror came as I was consumed by a far-lesser horror, having been one of seven people on the Legacy who survived the disaster. At least I was alive.
After being held in custody and questioned endlessly day and night in Brazil following the accident, addled, deeply traumatized and emotionally and physically exhausted, I arrived back in the United States on a flight that came into Kennedy airport at dawn. I cleared Customs and saw my wife and our two-year-old grandson (whom she had been babysitting that weekend) waiting anxiously ahead.
But as I went to them, I was ambushed by a Brazilian TV crew based in New York and demanding to know how I felt about the 154 dead. The bodies were only then being pulled out of the jungle. I had had no access to news reports while in custody. I could not even begin to grasp the horror that had suddenly fallen into the lives of the families and loved ones of the dead.
Stunned and stammering, I tried to convey my profound sympathy with the TV lights in my face. And in days of numbing, seemingly endless TV, print and radio interviews afterward, I tried to do it again and again, but in Brazil the emotional howl against the Americans was overwhelming. It did not seem to matter that we who had lived mourned those who had died. Instead, we were falsely depicted in the Brazilian media maelstrom as being cold and uncaring, the perpetrators of an unspeakable crime.
But back to the matter of those cockpit recordings:
In a disaster, cockpit voice recordings pick up the screams of the dying passengers. Using them to exploit a horror is despicable — but we all know what some media are capable of in the service of cheap dramatic narrative, the curse that will finally kill decent journalism in this country.
But the IFALPA statement, as weedling as it was in general tone, also illuminated a problem specific to this incident. Let me explain:
If you are a layperson unfamiliar with how an airplane is flown, and if you were to listen to the cockpit chatter on any flight, you would probably be surprised. It doesn’t sound at all like those stentorian pronouncements the captain makes to the passengers in the cabin on that 767 in its final approach to Houston.
That’s because flying a sophisticated airliner (and the Legacy is a modification of the Embraer 135/145 regional-jets familiar to most airline passengers) is nothing at all like driving a car down Interstate 95.
Unlike a driver, a pilot does not need to constantly have a hand on the equivalent of a steering wheel on an airplane flying at cruise altitude under auto-pilot. Pilots don’t have to keep their eyes ahead every second, as you do on a highway. In a cockpit under normal conditions, pilots can gossip, joke, gripe, talk to a flight attendant, whatever — and still be absolutely vigilant about the aircraft in flight.
In a journalistically disgraceful article in the January Vanity Fair magazine, William Langewiesche, himself a private pilot, spins a fantasia that purports to narrate the scene in the Legacy cockpit on Sept. 29, 2006.
To do so, he makes gross suppositions about the motives and thoughts of those of us who were on that airplane, based exclusively on his interpretation of the Legacy cockpit voice-recordings, including an audio copy that was slipped to him by the Brazilians — who, of course, uh, had no ulterior motive. (Shockingly, Langewiesche did not speak with the pilots or, I can hereby attest, with me or any of the other four passengers on board, or any of their legal representatives, to construct his fantasia. But you’ll hear more on that later — here and elsewhere.)
The flight being utterly normal till it crashed, the voice recordings depict a routine cockpit environment at 37,000 feet in wide open skies. The plane was on auto-pilot. The pilots performed their standard duties. In the interludes, they chatted with each other.
At one point, they can be heard expressing confusion about how to turn on an in-flight entertainment system that shows the aircraft position, altitude, etc. on screens back in the cabin. At another point, one of them took his new digital camera out and they groused about the typically indecipherable instructions.
At another point, the captain, Joe Lepore, left the cockpit to use the bathroom and stayed away for 16 minutes. At various points, as is utterly typical on a business jet flight, some of the passengers came up to the open cockpit door and chatted briefly with the pilots.
At the pilots’ invitation, I went forward and very briefly exchanged some pleasantries before returning to my seat by the left wing to continue working on my laptop.
(By the way, I was in the Navy for four years and I never called a ship a “she.” Despite what Langewiesche interprets from a muddy voice recording, I doubt very much that I said “How’s she flying?,” as if I was some schnook trying clumsily to sound cool to the pilots. I haven’t listened to the recordings, but most likely I said, “How’s it flying?” But checking with me would have killed the joke. I was also in naval aviation, and I am not unfamiliar with airplane cockpits of all sorts. As I reported in the New York Times right after the crash, I read the Legacy’s altitude off the altimeter, despite Langewiesche’s clumsy ridicule. If he’d checked with me … oh, never mind.)
I had been in Brazil on assignment from a trade magazine to spend two days touring Embraer’s headquarters near Sao Paulo, including its factories. It was two days and nights of wonk-work, being marched through production facilities and interviewing engineers, designers and Embraer planners.
Among the many things the Vanity Fair article gets very wrong is that. I was not on assignment to write about riding on some business jet, which would have been a stupid assignment. When the plane crashed, of course, that changed. I would have told Langewiesche that he was wrong — wrong about the scene on the flight, wrong about so many things but, of course, he never attempted to contact me. And yes, more on that lapse later, here and elsewhere.)
Anyway, my point is (and I think it was IFALPA’s as well) that unscrupulous media can use any cockpit voice recording to suggest, to those unfamiliar with what really transpires in a cockpit on routine flights, that the pilots are goofing off. (By the way, if you read the Vanity Fair article, note how the far more relaxed and even raucous scene in the cockpit of the doomed Gol 737 is depicted without ominous portent.)
Is this merely a journalistic objection, a protest that an honest journalist does not, not ever, pipe a scene to create a false impression and build a phony narrative from guesses?
Well, there’s more.
The Brazilian Air Force report on the crash just happens to, uh, make note of the very same observations about the scene in the Legacy cockpit, strictly as extrapolated from the voice recordings.
It notes, by way of trying to buttress its contention that the pilots were grievously at fault in myriad ways, that “the haste to depart and the pressure from the passengers hinder[ed] adequate knowledge of the flight plan.”
{By the way, the alleged “pressure form the passengers” is in part a shot at me, a risible suggestion, also unwisely made in several instances by Langewiesche, that the presence of a reporter on board the airplane created “pressure” on the Legacy pilots and contributed to the crash. More on that later, here and elsewhere.)
The Brazilian Air Force report says — in assertions directly disputed by the U.S. NTSB report that, of course, has no ax to grind — that the Legacy pilots’ preparation for the flight was “inadequate.”
The cockpit interaction, says the Brazilian Air Force report asserting that the Americans caused the disaster, was characterized by “informality.”
That’s one of the reasons that cockpit voice recordings shouldn’t be put in the hands of the unscrupulous who are determined to manipulate the uninformed.
But more on that later. Here and elsewhere.
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The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board issued investigative findings yesterday that concluded simply that the Sept. 29, 2006 mid-air collision that killed 154 over the Amazon was chiefly caused by mistakes by Brazilian air-traffic control that put both aircraft on a collision course at 37,000 feet.
The NTSB report also cites a “loss of effective air-traffic control” as a probable cause of the disaster, as well as “systemic shortcomings” in Brazil’s military-operated air traffic control system.
The report then cites some “contributing” factors in the disaster.
“Contributing to this accident,” the NTSB report said, were the “undetected” loss of transponder function on the Legacy caused by “inadvertent deactivation,” as well as a breakdown in radio and radar communication between air traffic control and the Legacy on for 50 minutes before the crash.
The NTSB had a team that participated in the lengthy Brazilian military investigation into the crash. The Brazilian military operates air-traffic control in that country, and controllers are military personnel.
The Brazilian report, also issued yesterday, puts far more emphasis on blaming the American pilots and minimizing the air-traffic control errors. The pilots, who are in the U.S., have been criminally charged by Brazil.
The NTSB report describes the “probable cause” of the disaster this way, referring to the Brazilian airliner that went down with all on board as “GOL1907” and to the American Legacy 600 business jet by its tail number, “N600XL” The report refers to Brazilian air-traffic control as “ATC.”:
“The evidence collected during this investigation strongly supports the conclusion that this accident was caused by N600XL and GLO1907 following ATC clearances which directed them to operate in opposite directions on the same airway at the same altitude resulting in a midair.”
It adds, “The loss of effective air traffic control was not the result of a single error, but of a combination of numerous individual and institutional ATC factors, which reflected systemic shortcomings in emphasis on positive air-traffic-control concepts.”
It adds, “Contributing to this accident was the undetected loss of functionality of the airborne collision-avoidance-system technology as a result of the inadvertent inactivation of the transponder on board N600XL” and “further contributing to the accident was inadequate communication between ATC and the N600XL flight crew.”
The report makes a striking contrast to the over 200-page report issued yesterday by the Brazilian Air Force investigative panel, which heavily emphasizes the allegation that the American pilots were largely to blame for the crash.
But the NTSB’s findings state that the Legacy pilots were “not in violation of any regulations” during the flight. Here are some of the findings from the U.S. panel:
—The Brazilian air-traffic controller supervising the flight handed it off “at an unusually early point” as it approached a new sector near Brasilia, losing a routine opportunity for a necessary navigational fix.
—As the Legacy entered the Brasilia sector about an hour before the collision, air-traffic control did not issue an altitude change order for the plane to descend to 36,000 feet for the next leg of the trip over the Amazon.
—Controllers supposedly monitoring the plane in both sectors were “unaware of the statue of N600SL’s altitude clearance” – that is, they did not realize that the Legacy was flying, as cleared, at 37,000 feet — “and did not take positive action to provide an amended clearance, confirmation or appropriate coordination.”
—Technical problems and confusion on the ground caused the controller handling “led to a misunderstanding” in the air-traffic control center at Brasilia about what altitude the Legacy had been cleared at.
—”The collision-avoidance technology aboard [the Legacy] did not function, likely due to an inadvertent deactivation of the transponder …” And “the flight crew of N600XL did not notice” that the transponder was inactive.
—On the ground, “ATC did not take appropriate action in response to the loss” of the Legacy transponder and continued to behave as if the Legacy transponder was operating properly.
—”Neither ATC nor the flight crew recognized the significance of the long time period without two-way communication …” and “ATC did not take adequate action to timely correct a known lost-communication situation with N600XL.”
—Air traffic control mistakes in assigning and utilizing radio frequencies and sector-configuration radar “contributed to the breakdown in communication with N600XL and the accident sequence of events.”
—The Brazilian military command that runs the air-traffic control system “did not provide adequate training and supervision” for controllers “to appropriately handle this situation.”
—Contradicting suggestions in the Brazilian report, the NTSB found that “the evidence does not fully support” Brazilian assertions that inadequate training and flight planning of and by the pilots contributed directly to the accident.
The report by the Brazilian-military-run CENIPA panel — whose conclusions a Brazilian judge said on Monday were not admissible in a court of law — goes to great lengths to blame the Americans, while only sketchily conceding that air traffic controllers played a role. Four low-ranking Brazilian air traffic controllers have also been charged criminally in the accident, though the Brazilan Air Force is trying to remove them from civilian court jurisdiction to military jurisdiction.
Joel Weiss, an attorney representing the American pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, said today of the Brazilian CENIPA report:
“In counterpoint to the NTSB report, the CENIPA report hides the real and obvious cause of this tragic accident. ATC placed these two competent flight crews on a collision course, traveling toward each other at the same altitude on the same airway. [The Brazilian report] also buries the fact that this was not only a result of major errors by individual air traffic controllers, but of institutional errors built into Brazil’s ATC system. The pilots should not be blamed for a string of utterly catastrophic errors committed by ATC.”
A statement issued by ExcelAire, the Long Island charter company that had taken delivery of the new Brazilian-made Legacy 600 in Brazil just hours before it crashed, said it was “unsurprising” that the “heavily slanted” CENIPA report placed “unfair blame on these American pilots.”
ExcelAire said, “It is a report by one branch of Brazil’s military, CENIPA, that must deal with catastrophic errors on the part of another branch of Brazil’s military, ATC. It transparently amounts to an attempt to save face in relation to ATC failures that should result in an international black-mark against the safety of Brazil’s ATC system and its skies.”
David Rimmer, ExcelAire’s executive vice president [and, along with me, one of the five passengers on the Legacy], said: “There is no reliable evidence that the transponder failure was reflected on the Legacy’s cockpit display. On the other hand, an important factor in the accident was the undisputed evidence of the failure of ATC to recognize the transponder failure and to provide increased separation as required by international aviation regulations. If ATC had increased aircraft separation as required, the accident would have been avoided.”
I’ll link to the Brazilian report as soon as I get a translation.
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More on the decision this week by a Brazilian federal judge to drop one of the key charges against the two American pilots in the 2006 mid-air collision that killed 154.
In his decision dropping one of several charges against the pilots, the judge also took aim at the Brazilian Air Force report on the crash that is expected to be released later today. The Brazilian Air Force is in charge of air-traffic control in that country.
The judge’s ruling on Monday said that the Air Force report, which is almost 300 pages long “does not have any value in the trial” of the pilots (who are now in the U.S.) or the four low-ranking air traffic controllers who were also criminally charged in the crash.
The Air Force report “is not an official report produced under the scrutiny of the [courts]. Therefore, the judge cannot examine it and refer to it for one or another conclusion,” federal judge Murilo Mendes ruled.
This is not the first time that the courts and the Air Force and federal police have been at odds in this horrible case. For over two months after the crash on Sept. 29, 2006, the American pilots were held in Brazil without charge.
On Dec. 9, 2006, hours after a judge ordered the pilots’ passports returned, freeing them to leave the country, the police and military hastily cobbled together criminal charges in a last-ditch but unsuccessful attempt to keep the American pilots detained in Brazil. The pilots barely made it out.
As noted yesterday, the judge in Sinop on Monday dropped charges of negligence against the pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, both employees of the Long Island air-charter company ExcelAire at the time of the crash. ExcelAire had just taken delivery of the new Legacy 600 business jet in Brazil and the pilots were ferrying it to New York with five passengers aboard [note, I was one of them] when the collision occurred.
In its ruling this week, the federal judge in Sinop, Mato Grosso, said that there was no evidence that the American pilots were negligent in the air-traffic control communications failures that preceded the crash.
He left standing against the pilots charges that they had failed to adhere to the original flight plan (the Legacy had been ordered to fly at 37,000 feet by air traffic control, rather than the 36,000 feet stated in the flight plan filed before take-off), and that the pilots were responsible, along with air traffic control, for not noticing that the Legacy’s transponder was malfunctioning or otherwise off-line for 50 minutes before the crash.
The charges against the pilots, basically unintentional manslaughter and unintentionally exposing Brazilian skies to peril, are not extraditable under U.S.-Brazilian treaties. But the charges carry a possible prison term of there years in Brazil.
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[Thanks to Richard Pedicini in Sao Paulo for translations and updates.]
One of the charges against the two American pilots charged by Brazil in the Sept. 29, 2006 mid-air collision over the Amazon that killed 154 has been dropped, though others still stand.
Just before the expected release tomorrow of a lengthy Brazilian report on the accident, a judge in Mato Grosso state dismissed negligence charges against the pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, both of Long Island. They were pilots of the Legacy 600 business jet that managed to land safely after the collision at 37,000 feet. [I was one of the seven survivors on the Legacy.]
The charge that was dismissed was of negligence, an assertion that the American pilots were at fault in radio-communications failures during the roughly 50 minutes before the crash. International pilots have said consistently that Brazilan air space over the Amazon is plagued in spots by radio and radar blind zones. The Brazilian military authorities responsible for the nation’s air space deny this.
The Brazilians still are charging the American pilots with criminal offenses. One charge is that they failed to follow a flight plan that listed their designated altitude at 36,000 feet in the air space where the crash occurred. But it is not in dispute that Brazilian air traffic control had ordered the Legacy to fly at 37,000 feet.
The other charge centers around the malfunctioning of the Legacy’s transponder, a radar-beacon-like device that signals the plane’s location and triggers an automatic anti-collision system. A working transponder would have been the last possible chance to avoid a collision that had been set in place for 50 minutes. It is not known what caused the transponder to malfunction. The pilots remain charged with inadvertently causing the transponder to go off-line.
Both pilots returned to the United States in December of 2006 after being held in Brazil for more than two months. They are being tried in absentia.
On Wednesday, a nearly 300-page report by the Brazilian Air Force — which operates the country’s air-traffic control system — will be released. The report will concede the air-traffic control and communications errors, but will also blame the pilots for inadvertently turning the transponder off and for not being aware that it was off till after the collision. Brazilian air traffic control also failed to notice that the aircraft was not signaling for 50 minutes, when controllers mistakenly believed the plane was at 36,000 feet.
At the same time the Brazilian report is issued, the United States National Transportation Safety Board will issue its own findings.
The NTSB will find that the probable causes of the accident were the air-traffic control orders to the Legacy to fly at 37,000 feet past Brasilia, and the complex on-ground communications and technological errors that occurred in air traffic control as the two aircraft, the doomed plane a Brazilian 737 that crashed in the jungle, unknowingly bore down on each other.
The NTSB will state that the transponder malfunction was a “contributing cause.”
You may bet on the fact that some elements of the Brazilian media will inaccurately assert — as they have in fact been doing for days as the report is selectively leaked — that the Brazilian Air Force report blames the American pilots almost exclusively for the disaster.
I’ll post a link to the full Brazilian report as soon as I have a translation. I’ll post the NTSB findings as soon as I get the text.
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