Brazil in mourning after fatal plane crash
The president of Brazil declared a state of mourning after more than 200 people were feared dead in what is believed to be the country’s deadliest air disaster.
A passenger jet with 176 people on board crashed and burst into flames after landing in driving rain, the Sao Paulo state governor said.
An official said at least another 15 people died on the ground after the Airbus-32 skidded across a busy road during yesterday evening’s rush hour and crashed into a petrol station and a building owned by Tam airline. The plane erupted in flames.
While the death toll officially stood at 40, it was expected to rise sharply as rescue workers, forensic experts and doctors scoured the wreckage in Sao Paulo, South America’s largest city.
The flight was arriving at Brazil’s busiest airport from Porto Alegre in Brazil’s extreme south.
“I was told that the temperature inside the plane was 1,000 degrees (1,830 Fahrenheit), so the chances of there being any survivors are practically nil,” state governor Jose Serra told reporters.
Emergency workers had recovered 25 charred bodies from what was left of the plane and 15 others who were on the ground either died at the scene or in hospitals, according to a Sao Paulo public safety media official.
The official said 10 more people on the ground were injured.
The runway at Congonhas airport has been repeatedly criticised for being too short, and two planes slipped off it in rainy weather just a day earlier, although no one was injured in either incident.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared three days of national mourning for the victims of the crash.
But presidential spokesman Marcelo Baumbach said last night that no cause would be immediately released because it was premature to do so.
“His worries now are with the victims and the relatives of the victims,” he said. “That is the main concern.”
It was Brazil’s second major air disaster in less than a year.
In September, a Gol Aerolinhas Inteligentes SA Boeing 737 and an executive jet collided over the Amazon rain forest. All 154 people on the passenger jet died. The executive jet landed safely in what was Brazil’s deadliest air disaster to date.
Describing yesterday’s crash, Tam worker Elias Rodrigues Jesus said he was walking near the site when he saw the jet explode in between a petrol station and a Tam building.
“All of a sudden I heard a loud explosion, and the ground beneath my feet shook,” Jesus said. “I looked up and I saw a huge ball of fire, and then I smelled the stench of kerosene and sulphur.”
Tam Linhas Aereas flight 3054 was en route to Sao Paulo with 170 passengers and six crew members, Tam said in a statement. Brazilian Congressman Julio Redecker was among those on the flight, but an aide did not know whether he was dead or injured.
The airline released a list of most of the people on the flight this morning, but did not specify their nationalities.
“Tam expresses its most profound condolences to the relatives and friends of the passengers who were on Flight 3054,” the company said.
Before the list was released, Lamir Buzzanelli said his 41-year-old son, Claudemir, an engineer, had called him from Porto Alegre to say he was on the plane and about to return from a business trip.
“My hopes are not too high because I’ve been calling him on his cell phone, and all I get is his voice mail,” Buzzanelli said.
The accident happened during heavy rains, and critics have said for years that such an accident was possible at the airport because its runway is too short for large planes landing in rainy weather.
In 1996, a Tam airlines Fokker-100 skidded off the runway at Congonhas airport and down a street before erupting in a fireball. The crash killed all 96 people on board and three on the ground.
A federal court in February of this year briefly banned takeoffs and landings of three types of large jets at the airport because of safety concerns at Congonhas airport, which handles huge volumes of flights for the massive domestic Brazilian air travel market.
But an appeals court overruled the ban, saying it was too harsh because it would have severe economic ramifications, and that there were not enough safety concerns to prevent the planes from landing and taking off the airport.
On Monday, two smaller planes slipped off the airport’s runway in rainy weather, but no one was injured.
But rain and the length of the runway shouldn’t be immediately blamed for the crash, said William Voss, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation in Arlington, Virginia.
He said the A320s were not covered under the judge’s ban, and that the Tam jet was a relatively recent model.
“So there are no red flags coming up, it sounds like a straightforward runway overrun,” Voss said.
