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Brazilian air traffic officials to solve crisis on their own

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.
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