Rescue crews pulled about 130 bodies yesterday from an airliner
that crashed and burst in flames at a Sao Paulo airport, as the
number of people feared dead rose to 200 in Brazil's worst air
disaster.
The TAM airlines Airbus-320 was en route to Brazil's busiest
airport from Porto Alegre in the nation's south on Tuesday when it
skidded on the rain-slicked runway, barreled across a busy road and
slammed into a gas station and TAM building.
Yesterday, the airline raised the number of people aboard the
plane by four to 180 and officials said the chance of finding
survivors was near zero.
One hundred and twenty-eight badly charred bodies had been
pulled from the wreckage by yesterday, Globo News television
reported.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared three days of
national mourning following 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 rainforest, killing 154
people in what had been the deadliest air disaster in the
country.
Yesterday, emergency workers recovered the TAM airlines
Airbus-320's "black box" flight data recorder, according to the Web
site of O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper.
Presidential spokesman Marcelo Baumbach said no cause would be
immediately released because it was premature to do so.
The runway at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport has been repeatedly
criticized for its short length, and two planes slipped off it in
rainy weather just a day earlier, though no one was injured in
either incident. The airport is ringed by heavily populated
neighborhoods.
The TAM flight was landing on Congonhas' 1,940-meter-long Runway
35, which was recently resurfaced but not grooved, which would
provide better breaking in rainy conditions. There were plans to
regroove the surface by the end of the month.
Because of its short length, Congonhas is known among pilots as
the "aircraft carrier". They are instructed to touch down in the
first 305 meters of runway, or do a go-around if they overshoot the
immediate landing zone.
In France, Airbus said it was sending five specialists to Brazil
to help investigate the crash.
?
The single-aisle, twin-engine plane, delivered in 1998, had
logged about 20,000 flight hours in some 9,300 flights, the
European planemaker said.?
More than 3,000 planes from the A320 family have been produced
and delivered over the years, Airbus said.
The accident happened during heavy rain, 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 crashed shortly after taking
off from Congonhas airport. 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.
(China Daily July 19, 2007)
