An airliner carrying 176 people crashed and burst into flames on Tuesday in São Paulo after landing at Brazil’s busiest airport in driving rain on a runway criticised as being too short. The state governor said all aboard were likely dead.
CNN reported the São Paulo fire department as saying at least 200 people, including some on the ground, were dead at the scene. There was no immediate news of survivors.
The Brazilian TAM airlines plane travelled the length of the runway before barrelling across a busy avenue at the height of the evening rush hour and crashing into a fuel station and a building owned by the airline.
“I was told that the temperature inside the plane was 1 000 degrees [Celsius], so the chances of there being any survivors are practically nil,” Governor Jose Serra told reporters at the airport.
People either in the building or at the fuel station were injured and taken to hospitals, Serra said.
A witness saw one charred body as flames shot into the sky and clouds of black smoke billowed into the air after the Airbus-320 skidded off the runway.
Later, vans used by São Paulo’s morgue raced away from the crash site and a doctor helping rescue workers told CBN radio that efforts were being made to identify bodies.
“I’m here at the site with a forensics team and a team of doctors making preliminary identification with photos,” Dr Douglas Ferraz said in the live interview. “I can verify 30 burned bodies and I know that there are burned bodies in another location.”
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared three days of national morning for the victims of the crash.
‘Huge ball of fire’
TAM worker Elias Rodrigues Jesus, walking near the site just as the crash happened, said the jet exploded between the fuel station and a warehouse owned by TAM.
“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 sulfur.”
Jesus said he saw one charred body, and Globo TV reported that at least seven people were being treated for injuries, some of them TAM workers who were in building. Congressman Julio Redecker was among those on the flight, but an aide did not know whether he was alive, dead or injured.
Flames were still shooting at least two storeys high around the three-storey building four hours after the crash and dozens of ambulances were at the site.
TAM Linhas Aereas flight 3054 was en route to São Paulo from the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre with 169 passengers and six crew members, TAM said in a statement.
“At this moment, we cannot determine the extent of possible injuries suffered by the airplanes occupants and crew members,” the company said.
Distraught relatives of passengers crowded TAM’s check-in counters in Porto Alegre, complaining hours after the crash that the airline had not yet released a list of passengers, Globo TV reported.
Accident warning
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 take-offs 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.
Tuesday’s crash came 10 months after Brazil’s deadliest crash, a September collision between a Gol Aerolinhas Inteligentes SA Boeing 737 and an executive jet over the Amazon rainforest.
All 154 people on the passenger jet died. The executive jet landed safely.
The September crash highlighted Brazil’s increasing aviation woes, as a surge in travellers overwhelms underfunded air-traffic control systems.
A Brazilian judge indicted four flight controllers and the smaller jet’s two United States pilots on the equivalent of manslaughter charges, but the defendants point to other problems — from holes in radar coverage to the inability of some Brazilian controllers to speak English clearly, the language of international aviation.
Controllers — concerned about being made scapegoats — have engaged in strikes and work slowdowns to raise safety concerns, causing or exacerbating lengthy delays and cancellations.
Major aviation accidents in Latin America since 1995
August 9 1995: A Boeing 737 jet, belonging to Guatemala’s Aviateca airline, en route from Miami, slammed into the Chichontepec volcano in El Salvador and burst into flames, killing all 65 people on board.
November 8: An air force Fokker 27 plane crashed in central Argentina’s mountains, killing all 53 on board.
December 20: An American Airlines passenger jet en route from Miami crashed into a mountain in south-west Colombia and killed 163 people on board. Four people survive the crash.
February 7 1996: A Dominican Alas Nacionales Boeing 757 carrying 189 people plunged into waters off the Dominican Republic, killing all on board.
February 29: A Peruvian Faucett airline Boeing 737 crashed in the Andes, killing 117 passengers and six crew members.
October 2: A Boeing 757 jet, owned by local airline Aeroperu, plunged into the Pacific Ocean off Peru, killing all 70 aboard.
October 22: A Boeing 707 cargo plane, belonging to US airline Million Air, burst into flames and crashed into a poor district of the port of Manta in south-east Ecuador, killing 25 and injuring 60.
October 31: A Fokker-100 aircraft from Brazil’s TAM airline slammed into homes in a densely populated area of São Paulo, killing all 96 people on board and at least eight on the ground.
August 29 1998: In Ecuador, a Cubana de Aviacion flight to Guayaquil crashed after taking off from Quito’s international airport. Eighty people died including 56 passengers, 14 crew and 10 people on the ground.
August 31 1999: An Argentine Boeing 737 from private airline LAPA crashed on take-off from an airport near Buenos Aires. Seventy of the 101 passengers and crew on board are killed. Ten more are killed on the ground.
December 21: A Cubana airline flight carrying 314 people skidded off the runway at the Guatemala City airport and into a neighbourhood, killing 26 people.
January 17 2002: An Ecuadorean state oil company plane carrying 26 people crashed in the Colombian jungle killing all on board.
January 29: All 92 people on board an Ecuadorean TAME Boeing 727 jetliner were killed when it crashed into the top of Colombia’s snow-capped Cumbal volcano.
September 29 2006: A Boeing 737 operated by Brazilian carrier Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes crashed after clipping wings with a Legacy business jet over Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, killing 154 people. The Legacy lands safely. — Sapa-AP, Reuters
Associated Press writers Stan Lehman and Vivian Sequera contributed from São Paulo and Brasilia