The head of an international air controllers' group said Brazil should seek foreign help to fix an aviation system buffeted by two disastrous crashes, a major radar outage and nearly a year of delayed and canceled flights.
Officials immediately rejected the idea, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva urged Brazilians to avoid leaping to conclusions about what caused the July 17 crash at the country's busiest airport. The death toll rose to 199.
Marc Baumgartner, president of the Montreal-based International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers' Associations, said on Monday that Brazil should bring in foreign experts to oversee the air traffic system because of the outage and other problems since last year's crash that killed 154 people in the Amazon.
"There are clear signs that Brazil's aviation system has institutional and structural problems that need to be resolved," Baumgartner said.
The idea was roundly rejected by Jose Carlos Pereira, the head of Infraero, Brazil's airline authority.
"Yes, we had two serious and totally unrelated accidents. But this crisis is ours. The dead are ours. The problem is ours and we are going to have to resolve it here in Brazil," Pereira said.
"Brazil does not need international help. Let them worry about their air space and we will worry about ours," he said.
A two-hour radar outage over the Amazon on Saturday added to the woes of a system already reeling from a crash in Sao Paulo.
It forced the diversion, delay or cancelation of international flights to and from Brazil -- the first time the nearly yearlong crisis of mass cancelations and delays has severely affected international flights.
The air force blamed the outage on an electrical failure and said it is investigating whether sabotage was to blame.
Flights were also delayed on Monday by heavy rain in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, but the situation with international flights appeared to be improving.
Silva criticized speculation that a short runway made slippery by the rain or plane problems may be to blame for the Sao Paulo crash and said clues to the cause of the crash won't become clear until the flight recorders of TAM Flight 3054 are analyzed by US authorities.
In Washington, National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Keith Holloway said data extraction could take anywhere from "a few days to a week."
The death count in the crash at Congonhas airport rose to 199 on Monday when TAM released a new list which included a taxi driver who was killed when the plane hit his parked vehicle.
The plane appeared to speed up after landing at Congonhas. It then jumped a highway, hit a gas station and an air cargo building and burst into flames.
The airline said one of the plane's two thrust reversers was deactivated, though that was allowed under government safety regulations.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS