189 Dead After Brazil Airplane Crash

Filed in archive Aviation News on July 18, 2007

On Tuesday, 189 passengers abroad a TAM airlines flight in Brazil died after the plane crashed. The official cause of the crash is unknown. However, the airport's runway is considered to be the major factor. The pilot attempted to land the plane on the short runway at Sao Paulo's Congonhas Airport, then tried to take off again. The death toll is expected to climb.

The 6,362-foot runway at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport has been repeatedly criticized as dangerously short. Two planes slipped off it in rainy weather just a day earlier. Pilots call it the "aircraft carrier" - it's so short and surrounded by heavily populated neighborhoods that they're told to take off again and fly around if they overshoot the first 1,000 feet of runway.

By contrast, New York's LaGuardia Airport has a 7,003-foot runway that accommodates similar planes, according to the federal aviation administration.

"What appears to have happened is that he (the pilot) didn't manage to land and he tried to take off again," said Capt. Marcos, a fire department spokesman who would only identify himself by rank and first name in accordance with department guidelines.

Temperatures reached 1,830 degrees inside the plane, and officials said there was no way passengers could have survived.

"All of a sudden I heard a loud explosion, and the ground beneath my feet shook," said Elias Rodrigues Jesus, a TAM worker who was walking nearby when he saw the crash. "I looked up and I saw a huge ball of fire, and then I smelled the stench of kerosene and sulfur."

TAM Linhas Aereas SA said 186 were on the Airbus-320 - 162 passengers, 18 TAM employees and a crew of six - and officials said three bodies of people killed on the ground had been recovered. There were fears of more dead on the ground, with 14 others taken to hospitals, where their conditions were not known.

Ninety badly charred bodies, along with the flight data recorder, had been pulled from the wreckage by midmorning, firefighters said.

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