Brazil’s deadliest air disaster provoked anger over safety conditions in the aviation sector as rescuers on Thursday pulled more bodies from the burned-out wreckage.
All 186 passengers and crew aboard the Airbus 320 were believed to have been killed in Tuesday’s fiery crash at São Paulo’s Cagonhas airport, along with a number of people on the ground.
The Tam Airlines flight had careened off the runway upon landing in heavy rain, shot across a crowded avenue and slammed into a warehouse where it exploded in a fireball.
It was ”a tragedy waiting to happen”, said Cezar Britto, president of the Order of Lawyers of Brazil, echoing opposition and national media criticism of precarious conditions at the airport.
”What exploded in Cagonhas was not just the TAM airbus and almost 200 victims but the credibility of the Brazilian aviation system,” Britto said.
Cagonhas is notorious for a runway some officials consider too short and which pilots say becomes slick when wet.
”The runway was as slippery as soap,” an unnamed pilot told the O Globo daily, adding that authorities should not have allowed the plane to land in such conditions.
With black smoke still hanging over the crash site, rescuers said early on Thursday they had pulled 181 bodies from the twisted metal of the plane and surrounding warehouse rubble. Three of the bodies were found inside the Tam Express building that was struck by the plane.
Five people were still listed as missing and 11 people were in hospital with injuries, four of them in a critical state, the rescuers said. Airline officials said there were no survivors from the plane itself.
”There is no sign of survivors,” TAM President Marco Antonio Bologna said at a news conference.
As choking, black smoke hung over the site and distraught relatives gathered to identify the remains of their loved ones, there were calls for authorities to improve safety at the airport and the aviation sector as a whole.
The crash was the latest of a series of incidents in which planes skidded off the tarmac at the airport, including one the day before Tuesday’s disaster.
The main runway had been resurfaced last month, but more work was scheduled for September to build grooves into the surface to allow for better water drainage.
”Control-tower operators had warned the runway should be closed because it didn’t have ‘grooving,’ but no one in the government wanted to hear about it,” said Sergio Olivera, who heads the Federation of Air Controllers.
Television footage of the plane’s landing, broadcast on Wednesday evening, showed the aircraft travelling down the runway at high speed — much faster than normal. While other planes took 11 seconds to travel down the runway, the ill-fated Airbus took only three seconds.
The plane then disappears from view after skidding off the left side of the runway, then a giant ball of flame fills the sky.
The Justice Ministry said it had ordered an investigation to establish whether the runway met technical and legal security standards. Officials said it was too early to speculate about what caused the crash.
One of the aircraft’s black boxes was recovered, which will be analysed by investigators.
Brazil’s airway infrastructure came under fresh scrutiny after the September crash of a Gol airliner with 154 people on board in the Amazon jungle. The plane had collided with a small jet in an incident blamed on a deficient air traffic-control system.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared three days of national mourning as world leaders conveyed their condolences over Tuesday’s crash.
The victims included two French nationals, an Argentine and a Peruvian.
Pope Benedict XVI expressed his sorrow, saying he prayed ”for strength and comfort for the injured and for those affected by the tragedy”.
France’s Bureau of Investigation and Analysis said it was sending two of its investigators and that its German counterpart, the BFU, was sending another two. Five Airbus experts were also on their way.
Just a few kilometres from São Paulo’s city centre, Cagonhas is Latin America’s busiest airport, with an average of 630 daily landings and take-offs. It is mainly used for flights from other parts of Brazil and South America.
In February a judge banned the use of the airport by Fokker 100, Boeing 737-800 and Boeing 737/700 jetliners, but the ruling was overturned by an appeals court.
TAM’s president declined to give an opinion on the runway’s condition, saying he would await the outcome of investigations ”to know what was the real cause of the accident”. — AFP
