Wednesday, November 29, 2006

A CLARIFICATION: DUE DILIGENCE?

Yesterday's post speculated that the Brazilian Air Force boys hustled up to inspect the Legacy transponder at Honeywell Aerospace in Phoenix this week as a kind of "Hail Mary" pass to find something incriminating while the Federal Police get ready to release the pilots and shift blame to the Air Force's air-traffic-control domain.

It's been pointed out to me that the far more likely explanation is that the Air Force was ordered to do one more symbolic bit of "due diligence" and report that they, too, had found no evidence -- before the jig is up. That makes a lot of sense, and I stand clarified.

[Note appended Nov. 30 -- I totally missed a story in O Globo last week in which the Air Force commander, Brigadier Luiz Carlos da Silva Bueno, was quoted as telling the Brazilian Senate that air traffic controllers may have made errors monitoring the Legacy from Brazilia, with one controller tellling his replacement at a shift change that the Legacy was at 36,000 feet, whenin fact it was at 37,000 -- and that, the brigadier said, the Legacy transponder was not working.]

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