Passenger Jet Skids Off Runway in Brazil
By LARRY ROHTER
RIO DE JANEIRO, July 17 — An Airbus 320 landing at the main airport in S?o Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, skidded off a runway early Tuesday night, continued across a busy highway during the evening rush hour, and crashed into an office building and a gas station, setting off a conflagration that took firefighters about three hours to bring under control.
Brazilian cable television showed firemen carrying away a body bag from the site, and the state government said there were fatalities on the plane and on the ground. There were 176 people, including six crew members, on board the flight, number JJ 3054 and operated by TAM Airlines, when the accident occurred, just before 7 p.m. After firefighters had knocked down the blaze, emergency crews began to move in.
Civil aviation in Brazil has been in crisis since last September, when the worst airline disaster in the country’s history, a collision over the Amazon between a passenger plane and a business jet, took place. Since that disaster, in which 154 people were killed, Brazil, Latin America’s most populous country, has been racked by waves of canceled flights, air controller strikes and go-slow actions, and revelations that the national radar system is deficient.
Tuesday’s accident occurred at the in-city Congonhas Airport, which is Brazil’s busiest and serves domestic flights. More even than other Brazilian airports, Congonhas has suffered repeated flight delays and cancellations in recent months, in part the result of a renovation and modernization of the main runway that was meant to reduce the risk of airplanes losing their grip on the worn concrete landing surface.
That project was finished late last month, but airlines have complained that the problem persists. Tuesday was a day of persistent rain in S?o Paulo, and engineers and physicists who spoke on Brazilian television Tuesday night suggested that those conditions contributed to the TAM pilot’s losing control of his aircraft.
The plane appeared to have crashed head-on into a building that is owned by TAM, Brazil’s largest airline, and is used for cargo shipments. City authorities ordered all local fire fighters to report for duty, and more than a dozen ambulances could be seen in the area around the airport.
