Command of English Would Have Prevented Brazil's Worst Air Tragedy Ever
Written by Kelly Oliveira
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
Brazil's worst air accident ever, on September 29, 2006, when an executive Legacy jet piloted by two Americans collided with a Boeing 737 over the Brazilian Amazon resulting in the death of 154 people, might have been prevented if only the Brazilian flight controllers who were monitoring the smaller plane had command of the English language.
This is the understanding of Ulisses Fontenele, the former president of the ABCTA (Associação Brasileira dos Controladores de Tráfego Aéreo - Brazilian Air Traffic Controllers Association). He has called attention to the fact that less than 10% of the about 2,500 flight controllers working in Brazil are able to speak English fluently. And according to Fontenele, those who speak the language do it because they learned English on their own initiative.
He believes that the US pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino and the personnel at Brasília's control tower had a hard time understanding each other. For Fontenele, there was a series of mistakes that culminated in the collision. He compared what happened to the domino effect (in which a single piece knocks down hundreds of others) and said that the tragedy might have been avoided if a single error in the sequence had not been made.
"If there was no trouble with the English when they took off there would be no accident. But there was an endless number of errors. If only one of them had been eliminated we wouldn't have any accident," he stated.
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http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/7917/54/![](http://www.sensesofcinema.com/images/directors/03/29/cat_nine_tails.jpg)
Published excerpts of air crash create stir in Brazil
BY BILL BLEYER
bill.bleyer@newsday.com
February 19, 2007, 8:38 PM EST
The publication of excerpts from the cockpit voice recorder on the private jet flown by two Long Island pilots involved in Brazil's worst aviation disaster has rekindled passions there, with some media repeating their early contention that the Americans' recklessness caused the collision that brought down a commercial jet.
But ExcelAire of Ronkonkoma, the company that owns the Legacy business jet flown by Joseph Lepore, 42, of Bay Shore, and Jan Paladino, 34, of Westhampton Beach, said in a statement Monday that the excerpts printed in a Sao Paulo newspaper Sunday had been improperly translated from English into Portuguese, taken out of context or misconstrued.
The publication of excerpts from the cockpit voice recorder on the private jet flown by two Long Island pilots involved in Brazil's worst aviation disaster has rekindled passions there, with some media repeating their early contention that the Americans' recklessness caused the collision that brought down a commercial jet.
But ExcelAire of Ronkonkoma, the company that owns the Legacy business jet flown by Joseph Lepore, 42, of Bay Shore, and Jan Paladino, 34, of Westhampton Beach, said in a statement Monday that the excerpts printed in a Sao Paulo newspaper Sunday had been improperly translated from English into Portuguese, taken out of context or misconstrued.
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http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-librazil0220,0,1842152.story?coll=ny-top-headlines