There was no warning, not even the roar of the approaching 737, before the two planes collided at 11 278m, according to a passenger aboard the smaller corporate jet whose seven occupants miraculously survived the fatal encounter.
Joe Sharkey, a reporter for the New York Times, was on assignment in Brazil and relaxing aboard the Embraer Legacy 600 jet with his window shade closed when he felt the mid-air impact.
Only hours later would he learn it had apparently sent a second plane spiralling to the floor of the Amazon rainforest, killing 155 people.
”Without warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence, save for the hum of engines,” Sharkey wrote in an account of the ordeal in Tuesday’s New York Times.
He opened his window shade to see ”a jagged ridge, perhaps a foot high, where the five-foot-tall winglet was supposed to be”.
The impact had also sheared off part of the plane’s tail, he later learned.
Moments before, Sharkey had strolled to the cockpit to chat with the two pilots, ”who said the plane was flying beautifully”.
A columnist who writes on business travel, Sharkey was flying at the invitation of the plane’s owner, a charter company called Excel Aire, and executives from Embraer, to the Brazilian city of Manaus.
The journey would become the most harrowing of his life. For the next 30 minutes, the pilots scanned maps and the ground for a place to land in the dense vegetation as the plane lost speed and the leading edge of the wing started to peel back.
”They sent out a mayday signal, which was acknowledged by a cargo plane somewhere in the region. There had been no contact with any other plane, and certainly not with a 737 in the same airspace,” Sharkey wrote.
Eventually the pilots spotted the runway of a military base hidden deep in the Amazon and managed to land the damaged plane.
The five passengers and two pilots still had no idea what had happened.
”I was lucky to be alive — and only later would I learn that the 155 people aboard the Boeing 737 on a domestic flight that seems to have clipped us were not,” Sharkey wrote.
”Investigators are still trying to sort out what happened, and how our smaller jet managed to stay aloft while a 737 that is longer, wider and more than three times as heavy, fell from the sky nose first.”
Search teams on Monday found the two black boxes of GOL flight 1907 in the jungle in a remote area of northern Brazil, the armed forces said.
Investigators hope the flight recorders will help explain why the Brazilian GOL airliner and the business jet touched in midair on Friday afternoon.
Soldiers battled humidity, heat and dense vegetation to recover the bodies of the 149 passengers and six crew members who perished in Brazil’s worst air disaster.
By Monday afternoon, officials had only reported the retrieval of two bodies by military crews who rappelled down to the crash site from helicopters.
A French national was among the victims. Four young children and an 11-month-old baby were also on the ill-fated plane.
The Brazilian military said there were no survivors. – Sapa-AFP