It’s hard to be happy about survival when it’s attached to the deaths of so many others. They still fly today, but if they land in Brazil they could face arrest. The investigation by the US National Transportation Safety Board later found that air traffic control failures were to blame but the situation in Brazil hasn’t yet been fully resolved for the pilots, who were acquitted in absentia of all but one charge, of safety failure, in 2012 by a Brazilian federal court. Meanwhile lawyers descended on the families of the victims. I thought they might be killed if they went to jail, because the hysteria and propaganda were so great.Īfter two months, their passports were returned. The pilots’ passports were confiscated and I ended up camped out with them on the top floor of the Marriott hotel in Rio. In Brazil, the military oversees accident investigation and air traffic control, and we worried that the investigation would be tainted. By the time they had found the wreckage of the other plane, the government had already declared us guilty. We watched as they brought our black box in. The next evening, we were flown out by military jet in a lightning storm to be interviewed by federal police in another town. It was then Brazil’s worst aviation disaster and it triggered a national crisis. It happened so quickly that even the pilots didn’t see anything. To this day I cannot fathom how, at that altitude and speed – a closure rate of 1,000mph – two planes could have contact head-on and not both crash. It took three minutes for the pieces to crash into the jungle. The winglet on our plane had taken off the left wing of the bigger plane, which immediately started to spiral and broke up. We later learned that we had collided head-on with a Boeing 737 operated by Gol, a Brazilian airline, with 154 people on board. As we speculated over pizza in the barracks, where we had no phone signal or internet access, the only Portuguese speaker in our group came over and said, “Guys, I’ve some news… There’s a missing airliner.” The hairs on my arms still stand up when I remember that moment. Outside the plane, we could see the tail had also been damaged it was a complete mystery as to what had happened. The soldiers looked stunned to see us, as if a UFO had landed. There was such an incredible sense of relief. But after the longest 35 minutes imaginable, we landed. It was straight ahead but we were a little too high, so we had to fly past and make a turn above the treetops: we had no way of knowing if the wing would hold up. The pilots found a military airport deep in the jungle. I thought about my kids and hoped they weren’t going to read about me dying. I remember staring at that wing, expecting the worst. The metal was separating and there was a sheen of fuel. As I was strapping in, Henry said, “We’ve been hit.” I looked out the window on the left side and saw that the winglet, the bit that curves up at the end of the wing, had been sheared off. I returned to my seat in stunned silence. It was as if we’d hit a speed bump at 100mph. I stumbled a little but then the plane returned to flying straight and level. I was standing up getting a phone charger from my bag when all of a sudden – bam! – I felt an impact. I remember saying to Henry, a colleague, “It doesn’t get any better than this.” The skies were clear the plane was beautiful. Soon we were cruising over the Amazon jungle at 37,000 feet and 500mph. There were two pilots up front and five of us in the cabin. I was sitting near the front of a business jet my company was delivering from our factory in Brazil to New York.
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