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.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
YELLOW SHIRTS: Many protesters were associated with pro-royalist groups that had previously supported the ouster of Paetongtarn’s father, Thaksin, in 2006 Protesters rallied on Saturday in the Thai capital to demand the resignation of court-suspended Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and in support of the armed forces following a violent border dispute with Cambodia that killed more than three dozen people and displaced more than 260,000. Gathered at Bangkok’s Victory Monument despite soaring temperatures, many sang patriotic songs and listened to speeches denouncing Paetongtarn and her father, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and voiced their backing of the country’s army, which has always retained substantial power in the Southeast Asian country. Police said there were about 2,000 protesters by mid-afternoon, although
RSS