Thomas Locke Hobbs

Let's see, a shave and a haircut are needed, I think. Sometimes I like the light so much [late afternoon, filtered through light clouds] but I don't have anyone but myself to take a picture of. I suppose I can get away with some ego-blogging on my vanity site.

The Ongoing Drama of GOL Flight 1907

On Sept. 29 two planes collided over the Brazilian Amazon. One of them, a one month old 737 with 154 people on board, crashed, killing everyone on board. The other, an even newer corporate jet somehow survived and landed at a nearby airforce base. One of the passengers on the jet was Joe Sharkey, the New York Times Business Travel columnist. Not a week after the incident he wrote a column about his brush with death.

How to do planes collide in the middle of the Amazon? Philip Greenspun, blogger and amateur pilot, suggested that GPS may have played a role. Planes flown manually will tend to have some random variance in their elevation. Auto-pilot is more precise and when both of these planes were given instructions to fly at 37,000 feet, disaster was set in motion.

The crash has had a lot of repercussions in Brazil. Since early investigations suggested air traffic control was at fault by directing both flights to fly at the same altitue, the controllers have been staging a work-to-rule slow-down, protesting their work conditions and out-of-date equipment. This has lead to horrific delays across Brazil of 12 hours or more. Recently a crowd of 40 angry passengers stuck overnight in Curitiba stormed a runway in protest.

Absurdly, the authorities suggested the jet pilots were pulling aerial stunts in the empty skies over the Amazon. The pilots have denied this, of course, as has Mr. Sharkey and the other passengers aboard the jet. Ironically, had they been pulling such stunts, they'd probably have deviated off course and avoided the GOL flight.

The two American pilots of the corporate jet have had their passports seized by a Brazilian judge pending the conclusion of the investigation and been all but crucified in the Brazilian press. The Air Force, which oversees air traffic control is also running the investigation. They have been dragging their feet since they realize its their fault. The pilots have been stuck at a hotel in Copacabana. One can imagine worse fates than spending a couple of months on the beach in Rio but clearly their quasi-incarceration is unfair.

To put an American perspective on this, imagine a plane carrying young families home from Disney World crashes after colliding with a private jet piloted by two Saudi Arabians. Imagine all the outrage and ugly xenophobia that would bring out.

Joe Sharkey has since started a blog where he's been writing detailed but very readable updates of the unfolding drama/farce.

This whole sad story calls out for an article by William Langewiesche who practically made is career at The Atlantic writing about airplane crashes. Unfortunately his articles aren't online but several of them have been collected in his excellent book, Inside the Sky.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006