Brazil jet in crash was speeding down runway

Close call Thursday
On Thursday, another TAM plane had to pull out of a landing and was rerouted to the city's international airport after coming in at an unsafe angle — a fairly routine event at Congonhas.

A day before the crash, two planes skidded off the runway. And on March 22, a Boeing 737-400 overshot it in a heavy rain, stopping just short of a steep drop.

In February, a federal court briefly banned three types of large jets from the runway, but was overruled on appeal. Airbus-320s were not covered under the court's ban.

By Thursday, 181 bodies had been retrieved from the site where the Airbus crashed, but forensic examiners had managed to identify only 11 and said it could take a month to identify them all.

The crash came less than a year after Brazil's previous worst air disaster: 154 people were killed in the September collision of a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 with a small jet over the Amazon rainforest.

That accident touched off months of congressional investigations that raised questions about the country's underfunded air traffic control system, deficient radar and lack of investment in infrastructure, even as airlines struggle to cope with a surge in air travel caused by Brazil's booming economy.

Finance Minister Guido Mantega said the government has invested heavily in Brazil's air travel infrastructure and plans future investments of $525 million to meet rising traffic.

The plane's two black boxes were being sent to the United States for analysis and French investigators also were helping probe the cause of the crash.

Henrique Castro de Souza, a civil servant in line for a TAM flight Thursday, said he believed the airport should close.

"Whenever lives are at risk and something can be done to reduce that risk, if that means shutting down this airport so be it," he said. "Of course, it's going to create a mess, but you have to choose between messes and life."

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