O.K. enough fooling around.
For those of you really interested in the Sept. 29 mid-air crash that killed 154 in Brazil, here is the report that ExcelAire recently filed with the Federal Police. It's a 22,000-word document with graphics and radar screen grabs.
As you know, I have been following this case carefully since walking away from the crash with six others on the business jet. The ExcelAire report describes in cold, hard detail the chain of mishaps and break-downs on the ground that led to the crash. So far as I know, none of the details in this report is in dispute.
The only mystery remaining is why the Legacy's transponder -- which triggers the anti-collision alert warning -- was not signaling for 55 minutes before the crash (it began transmitting again right after impact).
This week, the National Transportation Safety Board issued a summary partly addressing this issue, and confirming that pilots do not receive adequate warnings in the cockpit when a transponder goes off line for any reason.
Air traffic control on the ground, however, had 55 minutes of warning that the Legacy transponder was not working properly and failed to take any action to separate the Legacy from the oncoming Gol 737 at 37,000 feet.
Incidentally, Joe Brancatelli, who kindly links to this site from his Joesentme.com business-travel site, suggests that I need to separate the archive of the Brazil posts from the travel posts and rants on media and politics, like yesterday's posts.
He's right.
Next on the agenda is an easy way for those who are keenly interested in the Brazil story -- and I know a lot of pilots and other aviation professionals and reporters who are -- to get to the Brazil archives without wading through goofs about J. Edgar Hoover's being a zombie.
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