Brazil 737-Embraer Crash

On Thu, 5 Oct 2006 10:28:46 -0700, "news.charter.net"
wrote in
:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/bu...ewanted=2&_r=1

Thanks for the link to the New York Times story (even if I did have to
use bugmenot.com to access it). Unfortunately it doesn't mention the
TCAS system which was the subject of the article to which you were
following up. But it did contain this nugget:

A Brazilian military inspector standing by surprised me by his
willingness to talk, although the conversation was limited by his
weak English and my nonexistent Portuguese.

He was speculating on what happened, but this is what he said:
Both planes were, inexplicably, at the same altitude in the same
space in the sky. The southeast-bound 737 pilots spotted our
Legacy 600, which was flying northwest to Manaus, and made a
frantic evasive bank. The 737 wing, swooping into the space
between our wing and the high tail, clipped us twice, and the
bigger plane then went into its death spiral.

It sounded like an impossible situation, the inspector
acknowledged. “But I think this happened,” he said. Though no one
can say for certain yet how the accident occurred, three other
Brazilian officers told me they had been informed that both planes
were at the same altitude.