Criminalizing Aviation Accidents Only Assures Repeats

ByABC News
December 7, 2006, 11:33 AM

Dec. 7, 2006— -- On the clear, late afternoon of Sept. 29 , two sophisticated jets approached each other along an airway known as UZ6. Their combined speed was in excess of a 1,000 miles per hour. Both were at 37,000 feet over the Amazon jungle, and neither set of pilots were aware of the other.

No alarms went off. No air traffic control warnings were given. And no rules were broken because both crews had climbed to their assigned altitude.

In a micro-second, the left, upturned "winglet" of the brand-new Embraer Legacy 600 business jet sliced into the left wing of the Boeing 737. The Embraer's pilots knew only that an explosive force of some sort had rocked them, and that they now had a marginally controllable airplane.

For the pilots of the commercial airline flight known as Gol 1907, however, the situation was far worse. Their essentially new Boeing 737 was becoming uncontrollable. As the business jet they'd hit limped toward an emergency landing, the 737 impacted the dense forest below. All 137 people aboard died.

Within hours of the crippled business jet's safe landing at an airfield just north of the collision point, the Brazilian government began investigating the accident with a painfully obvious emphasis on finding someone to blame, rather than finding an explanation for the tragedy.

The passengers and owner of the damaged Embraer 600 -- held and questioned for 36 hours -- were eventually released.

But even as another arm of the Brazilian government began to suspect that the crash had been nothing more than a tragic accident and not a result of any purposeful or negligent act by either set of pilots, an overzealous prosecutor was asking a Brazilian court for authority to confiscate the U.S. passports of the two American pilots.

In the weeks afterward, Brazilian authorities confronted the truth -- that their own air traffic controllers had made a massive human error by placing the two jets at the same altitude in opposite directions along the same airway.