An amazing tale

That's bizarre, but I've personally felt the failure of the needle-in-the-haystack theory of accident avoidance.

One of them had to be at the wrong altitude, though. Can't remember from my ground school many 100s of years ago, but going one way you're supposed to be at even altitudes (36,000 feet; 38,000 feet) and the other at odd altitudes.

 

I took an aviation class in college, and I remember the prof saying that. He also said that larger jets tend to fly higher unless making a final descent, so I wonder if maybe the corporate jet was flying too high or, as you said, flying at the wrong even-odd altitude.

 

I think I read it was neodd (north and east odd) and sweven (south and west even). There's my bit of trivia for the night.

 

Unreal. Last week I read the news story that mentioned that a NYT columnist was aboard the smaller plane, so I've been on the lookout for this piece. It floors me that they never saw each other, never knew the other plane was there.

 

This info may have been in the other stories, but ... doesn't sound good for those pilots:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/10/04/brazil.crash.ap/index.html

 

What can you do, though?
It's not like it was done intentionally even if they did cause it.
Very tragic accident, nothing more.

 

well if they were at the wrong altitude - which trained investigators will try to determine - then their negligence or incompetence may have caused the death of everyone in the other plan. i'm not saying that's what happened, but that's the theory.

as for the NYT piece, that was a great read. on one level though it makes me think of the randomness of life itself. every day people die from freak accidents in which they did nothing wrong but were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. you just hope and pray it never happens to your family.

 

Well, if they ignored an order to change altitudes, there would seem to be some culpability.

EDIT: Leo beat me to the point.

 

Pilots are screwed.. "detained?" Precursor to a witch trial...

 

this is a sad story, but these two pilots are done because of this:

"I saw the readout that showed our altitude: 37,000 feet. I returned to my seat. Minutes later came the strike (it sheared off part of the plane’s tail, too, we later learned)."

it's pretty obvious these pilots didn't follow the rules.

 

unfortunately that kind of evidence ("c'mon they're not gonna ignore an order to change altitudes") might not go over too well in this case considering what happened.