Posted on 11/02/2006 4:00:35 PM PST by Yo-Yo
Associated Press
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — The flight recorder transcript from the Long Island executive jet involved in Brazil's worst air disaster shows that its pilots were told by Brazilian air traffic control to fly at the same altitude as a Boeing 737 before the planes collided, according to a newspaper report Thursday.
The smaller executive plane, which managed to land safely, was piloted by two Long Island men: Joseph Lepore of Bay Shore, N.Y., and Jan Paladino, of Westhampton Beach, N.Y.
All 154 people aboard Gol Airlines flight 1907 were killed on Sept. 29 when the Boeing 737 crashed into Brazil's dense Amazon rainforest after clipping the Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet.
According to the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, the flight recorder shows Mr. Lepore receiving instructions from the tower in Sao Jose dos Campos to fly northwest at 37,000 feet “until Eduardo Gomes,” the airport in Manaus. That altitude contradicted the pilots' filed flight plan as well as established norms, which reserve odd-numbered altitudes for southbound flights.
Defence Ministry spokeswoman Flavia de Oliveira said she could not confirm Folha's report. She said more information could come Monday after air force officials returned from Canada where the black boxes from the two planes were sent for analysis.
Folha did not reveal how it had obtained the transcript. The air force, which oversees Brazil's air traffic controllers, has not yet released it to Brazilian federal police investigating the crash, or to the National Transportation Safety Board investigators who are participating in the probe.
The Legacy's pilots — employees of ExcelAire Service Inc. of Ronkonkoma, N.Y. — were flying the Brazilian-made jet on its maiden voyage back to New York, and managed to land the badly damaged jet safely. They've been ordered to stay in Brazil during the investigation.
A lawyer for ExcelAire said the Folha report supported the pilot's testimony to investigators.
“As we've maintained from the beginning, the pilots were cleared to Manaus for flight at three seven zero (37,000 feet) at the time of departure and we're confident that anyone that is able to hear the tower tapes or see a transcript of the instructions issued by the Sao Jose tower will hear the exact the same thing,” said the lawyer, Robert Torricella.
The tower instructions reported by Folha may have been the first of a series of problems that led to the crash. As the Legacy approached Brasilia, the plane lost radio contact with the control tower. The Legacy's transponder, which signals the plane's location to the tower and other airplanes, also stopped working. Just what prevented the radio and transponder from working remains unclear, but from that point on, both the pilots and the air traffic controllers lacked critical information. Controllers had no way of knowing the smaller plane's altitude.
Brazilian officials have insisted that the Legacy should have returned to its original flight plan after losing contact with the control tower. That plan would have mostly kept the smaller jet at 36,000 feet after Brasilia, and out of the path of the 737, which was flying at its customary altitude of 37,000 feet. Instead, both planes remained on a collision course.
But aviation experts say air traffic controller orders always take precedence over flight plans. They've also questioned why the controllers didn't order the larger jet to change course just to be safe, since they lacked altitude information on the smaller jet at the time.
Brazilian officials have seized the passports of the two pilots — Mr. Lepore, of Bay Shore, Long Island and Mr. Paladino, of Westhampton Beach, Long Island — and they have remained in a Rio de Janeiro hotel while the probe drags on, delayed in part by the air force's reluctance to turn over the transcript.
The air force has explained the delay as normal under the Convention on International Civil Aviation, also known as the Chicago Convention, which is designed to protect information given voluntarily to investigators.
Aviation ping
Tower to Embraer Legacy: Please execute a 45 degree right turn for noise abatement.
Embraer Legacy: Tower, we are currently at FL 370, what do you mean "noise abatement"?
Tower: Have you ever heard how loud it is when you collide with a 737?
I know, tasteless, sorry.
That must have been pretty scary for the pilots. Threatened to be jailed, and the main thing that could exonerate you is held secretly and delayed, subject to manipulation or loss.
Brazil is one of the most corrupt countries on earth....what do you expect..honesty
I've been keeping track of this investigation, and there are some serious questions to be answered..Many pro pilots have said there is a comm gap in that area, Brazil insists not; Legacy's transponder HAD to have been off, hence no TCAS alert-WHY or HOW?; Given a nordo on head-on course at same alt, why didn't ATC change course of 737? All serious questions, and will take a long time to sort it out.
Don't be silly, of course someone will blame the "arrogant Americans".
Things like "facts" don't matter to people who hate America and need to project their mental illness
Now that Brazil went and made such a big stink of it all..
What happened - New Jersey got old, so he decided to become a Brazilian lawyer?
Even if one transponder went out, please remember that *both* planes had transponders and TCAS. So while one TCAS can be forgiven for missing a dead transponder, the other can't, and pilots of each plane are going to take a TCAS collision warning seriously enough to change course/altitude.
It would take a failure of two transponder/TCAS systems for both planes to have no mechanical warning, and it just takes one aircraft doing the right thing to avoid a mid-air.
So what's on the *other* black box?!
<< Yo-Yo
bummer for Brazil, can't blame the "arrogant Americans" for this one. >>
Don't bet your house.
Rather, bet it on the absolute fact that Planet Earth's third world sh'ole states have the moral integrity of American trial lawyers and will always find a way into the deapest pockets.
The Brazilians, already holding hostages against the outcome, will find their way into the pockets of America's insurance companies - and thus into yours and mine.
Just as surely as John Edwards enthralled Southern juries with the moral-integrity, Human intelligence, veracity, biology and genes-defying fabulizations by way of which he extracted the hundreds of millions of Dollars from their owners that enrichened him and his co-conspirators.
Just as surely as the Singaporeans blamed Taiwan for the incompetence of the Singapore Airlines "pilots" who took off on the wrong runway in a typhoon and just as surely as the same gang extracted Hundreds of Millions of Dollars from Boeing for their Silkair's psychotic "pilot's" suicide/murder of more than a hundred innocent air travellers.
And just as surely as the feckless French blamed Continental Airlines and extracted Hundreds of Millions of Dollars from American insurance companies for the entirely French criminal negligence of maintenance and subsequent grotesque comedy of operational errors and cockpit anarchies that killed Concorde.
No, both transponders have to be working for either to get a TCAS alert.
note: what I mean by that is one (selected) transponder on each aircraft has to be working. Each aircraft has two transponders but they can only select one at a time.
I'm not a pilot, so help me out here. As I understand it, TCAS interrogates other transponders and measures the time it takes for them to reply to determine distance, and uses the altimeter information encoded in the transponder signal for altitude, right?
OK, as I recall from my ancient days in the military, a transponder is both a receiver and a transmitter that responds to a radar interrogation to enhance the radar return (transmitter responder) and also to encode information such as altitude and flight number information, or to "squak" codes. If there is no radar painting the aircraft, then there is no transponder transmission.
Now we enter the modern world of TCAS and I move from knowledge to speculation. They were flying over radar free airspace, so there was no radar painting the transponder to trigger a transponder transmission. The only other way to trigger the transponder would be for a TCAS equipped aircraft to "interrogate" other transponders in the area. So far so good?
Now the $64,000 question: How does TCAS interrogate other transponders, and receive information from other TCAS units? My gut tells me it does it by using it's own transponder! If your own transponder is not functioning, and there is no radar painting other aircraft to trigger their own transponders, how would either aircraft's TCAS know there was conflicting traffic?
Say that again? If you mean one transponder working on each aircraft, then there would be a TCAS alert on both TCAS-equipped aircraft, not just one. If you mean one transponder selected and functioning on one aircraft but no transponder selected and working on the other aircraft, there would not be a TCAS alert on either aircraft. TCAS is inoperative with transponder failure.
From the article you cited: "TCAS should reduce NMAC probability by at least 90 to 98 percent,’ depending on whether one or both aircraft in an encounter are equipped with TCAS.”
Notice it says "equipped with TCAS". This statement is true, assuming the aircraft each have an operable transponder. If there is no transponder active on a given aircraft, it is not capable of transmitting a signal to the other aircraft. The TCAS-equipped aircraft has to have a transponder to transmit a signal to the other aircraft.
The aircraft with both a transponder and TCAS can interrogate the aircraft with only a transponder and no TCAS -- you get alerts on him, but he gets nothing. If the traffic does not have altitude reporting on his transponder, then you get only a TA (traffic advisory), regardless of the conflict.
Southack: "TCAS interogates other traffic, it does not care about your own transponder."
This statement is incorrect. Each aircraft must have an operable transponder for either to get a TCAS alert. If your transponder is inoperative, nobody knows you're there, including ATC, unless they get you on a primary radar "skin paint" (there are other methods such as automatic dependent surveillance (ADS) but they are not employed over Brazil).
My statement in post #15, clarified with #16, is correct.
One other point -- if an aircraft has two transponders only one can be selected at a time. ATC has to tell them their transponder is inoperative -- the usual first response is to immediately select the other one with a switch on the transponder control head (unless the transponder was switched off for some reason, such as accidentally -- then just turn it back on). One other point worth considering -- you always operate your transponder with altitude reporting "on". If the traffic also has altitude reporting, then both resolution advisories are coordinated. Ex.: You climb - He descends.
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