Well it's a sad day here in Porto Alegre.

my heart goes out to the familys that lost loved ones.

http://fotos.noticias.bol.uol.com.br/imagensdodia/20070718_tam_album.jhtm?abrefoto=1

some pictures.

Yeah that´s Santos Dumont. I prefer the water. Airplanes do float, our at least should float. It´s not in the middle of the ocean. Depending on from where you land, you might actually get off at the beach. I guess if this had happened here, there would be survivors. I remember a plane in Washington dropping in the Potomac River that had quite a few survivors.

Originally posted by sven Ed, Sorry for the loss of your friend. Any idea why this might have happened? AFIK, in most cases it´s a whole pandemonium of factors that contribute to an accident like this. The asphalt being "new" usually causes it to be very slippery, especially with moderate rain.

Thanks Sven !

I will try to speculate on what might have happened yesterday evening, based on my 32 years of operating at Congonhas. Like I said on my previous post, there was moderate rain at the time. The approach was performed to runway 35Left. It is common with that kind of weather to encounter Wind Shear (microbursts) on short final (just before landing) at that particular runway. I believe there was a sudden loss of airspeed and a correction was made for that condition, but almost instantaneously there was a large increase in airspeed. That's what wind shear does to an airplane: dramatic changes in airspeed, from high to low, to the end of the show. The airplane became destabilized at the most critical phase of flight. Due to the airspeed increase, their plane gained altitude, became high, so touchdown was probably performed beyond the standard first 300 meters, compounded by higher than normal landing speed. I believe that after initial touchdown, they realized that there wouldn't be enough available runway to stop the airplane, so a "go around" was attempted; in layman terms, they tried to fly it off the runway. For them to have crashed where they did, they were no where near the deceleration process. For me to speculate on how this "go around" was attempted would be going to far on my part.
In regards to Congonhas being a "challenging" airport for pilots, in my opinion, I really don't think so. I just never let my guard down, specially when landing to the north (runways 35Left and 35Right - the short one). Since some have touched on the subject of "scary airports", I will list 3 in order of difficulty, that get my adrenalin flowing: Telluride (Colorado), Aspen (Colorado) and Santos Dumont, when landing to the north, overflying Botafogo. An important thing to remember, as a pilot, when departing Santos Dumont airport, is - should you have a failure of some kind during takeoff, remember to FLY the airplane, or else you'll have a big rock stuck in the nose of the airplane.

Ed

Edited by Edumen - 18 July 2007 at 18:36