Article about GOL/Legacy midair

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/air_crash200901

Interesting read and does a good job of cutting through the political aspect. I didn’t know many of the details before reading the article and was amazed at what really happened. Sounds like it will come down to the role ATC played (or didn’t play for that matter) but the surviving pilots will still probably be an attempted scapegoat.

I’m curious to what lead to the transponder being OFF. Having a lot of experience with the systems found in the Legacy I know it would be very difficult to inadvertently turn it off and as the article said there is no warning that the transponder/TCAS is off other than a small advisory message. There have been times (albeit rare) that ATC has reported losing our signal which recycling the transponder ON then OFF or switching to the other transponder has brought our signal back. Perhaps that is what happened with this crew as the article mentioned that it was curious that right after collision the transponder started working, the crew cycled the transponder and it came back. Just speculation.

The CVR’s are there to listen to as well. The GOL CVR is sobering while the Legacy CVR is quite interesting to listen to as they struggle to fly the plane, communicate with ATC and try to find a place to land. Amazing that neither aircraft saw each other but given the closure rate and time they had to see each other I guess it isn’t out of the realm of possibilities as this accident shows.

The Wikipedia page about the accident has some interesting illustrations of the aircraft orientations when they collided as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gol_Flight_1907