AP News, August 4th, 2007
The head of Brazil's airport authority is being replaced in response to the nation's worst aviation disaster, Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said Saturday.
Sergio Mauricio Brito Gaudenzi, the president of Brazil's Space Agency, will replace Jose Carlos Pereira as head of the airport authority, Infraero, the minister told reporters in the Amazon city of Coari.
The change, to be made Monday, is the second high-level personnel shake-up in Brazil's troubled aviation sector since the crash.
Jobim was appointed to replace Waldir Pires as defense minister on July 25, eight days after a TAM Linhas Aereas SA jetliner sped off the runway of Sao Paulo's busy Congonhas airport and exploded. All 187 people aboard and 12 people on the ground were killed.
The airport authority was criticized for reopening the airport's relatively short runway before it was grooved _ a process that helps water run off and provides better traction in rain.
Critics also say that Pereira and Infraero paid more attention to the renovation of passenger terminals and the construction of parking areas than to safety measures like grooving, the installation of long safety strips at the end of the runways and better instrument landing systems.
The O Estado de S. Paulo and Folha de S.Paulo newspapers on Saturday quoted an internal Airbus statement that said the data recorders failed to show any functional flaws that would have prevented the plane from operating normally.
The statement, according to the two dailies, supports earlier reports indicating that the throttle of the right engine was set to accelerate instead of neutral when the plane landed.
Airbus spokeswoman Barbara Kracht said she could not comment on the reports.
The air force, according to the O Estado de S. Paulo, said that the black box data being analyzed is not conclusive and that it is too early to determine if the incorrect position of the throttle was due to a mistake made by the pilots or to a flaw in the aircraft's computers.
