Aloft

by William Langewiesche

  9

  The Devil at 37,000 Feet

  What were the odds? There were so many chances for the accident not to occur – so many ways to break the chain that led to it – that a crash investigator later told me it seemed the Devil himself was at play. The men responsible were American pilots and Brazilian air-traffic controllers working the high-altitude jet routes above the Amazon basin in central Brazil. If these were not the sharpest guys around, they were ordinary for the type, until then functional enough, and not so stupid that stupidity alone can explain the disaster that they brought about. It was Friday, September 29, 2006, toward the end of the dry season in northern Mato Grosso State, where the Amazon jungle reaches south along the broad, brown Xingu River. The sky that afternoon was pale and hot. Dolphins swam in the river, as they always have. Turtles lazed on the banks. On the rough dirt road that cuts for hundreds of miles through the forests and clearings, a few vehicles crept along as usual, boiling the dust in second gear and drifting clouds of it across the occasional settlements. The road has a federal designation, BR-80, but it is less a road than a track. It leads from nowhere to the same. During the rainy season it becomes nearly impassable. The settlers who followed it into the jungle call themselves the Forgotten Ones. Those who feel superior to the Indians nearby seem nonetheless resigned to low ambitions in life. When strangers drive by, the settlers pause to watch. This and television pass for entertainment. Otherwise most days go by like all the others. September 29 was a day like those, too. There were no strangers on the ground that I know of. If there was any sense of urgency, it was in the late afternoon, when the few drivers within range of the Xingu River crossing began pushing to make the final ferry, at sundown.

  The crossing is in the heart of Caiapó Indian territory, a large and densely forested reserve. The ferry is a barge side-tied to a small tugboat piloted by taciturn Indians. The ferry operation is their only source of income beyond government handouts. The main village is nearby. About 300 Caiapós live there in airy thatch-roofed huts that are tidier than the squalid shacks of the Forgotten Ones. They paint their bodies with geometric designs, but wear Western clothes on top. Some have a penchant for camouflage shirts. Some stretch their lower lips around lip plates. It is an impractical fashion, which makes spitting hard. The men call themselves ‘warriors,’ which must do something for their pride. They are hunters and fishermen who go disappearing into the jungle for days at a time. The women stay home, where they tend to the children and village chores. The village is noisy because of all the comings and goings, the babies who cry, and the constant din of chickens. But on the afternoon of September 29, about a minute before 5 PM, two women who had gone into the silence by a stream to wash heard a single roll of heavy thunder. The thunder was strange because the sky was clear. The women returned to the village and reported what they had heard.

  In the aftermath the press made much of this Caiapó group, describing them as people close to nature and therefore pure, and with experience so limited to their traditional ways that they understand airplanes as distant iron birds. The reality is more complex. I counted five satellite television dishes in the village, and, out beyond an imposing schoolhouse, found a groomed dirt runway long enough to accommodate high-performance turboprops. The Caiapós certainly know what airplanes are. In fact their leader, a heavyset man named Megaron, sometimes gets around on government-paid chartered ones, and several years ago was flown to New York by the musician Sting to join a campaign for the preservation of Indian lands. Sitting in a council space in the shade of trees, Megaron described his arrival in New York to me – looking out his window and seeing other airplanes in flight, and then watching them land, one after the other, just minutes apart. He had been impressed by the performance of New York air traffic control. So much for the ‘iron bird’ part of the story. Nonetheless, it is true that the Caiapós are not sold on modernity as it is typically defined. They have not, for instance, been Christianized or persuaded to abandon their traditional beliefs, which include the proximity of a parallel world ‘on the other side,’ roamed by the souls of the sudden-dead, with whom only a shaman can talk. Was it possible that the thunder had escaped from there? In some sense it had. But to ride in airplanes is not to have them foremost in mind. No one among the Caiapós imagined that the thunder was the sound of a Boeing 737 hitting the ground. The same bewilderment afflicted others within earshot of the impact. To the west of Caiapó territory, at the headquarters of a 21,000-head cattle ranch called Fazenda Jarinã, many of the employees heard the thunder and could make nothing of it. The manager of Fazenda Jarinã is a small, lonely man named Ademir Riebero, who told me he knew that the north–south traffic between Manaus and Brasília passes high overhead, and that at night you can hear the airplanes and see their lights. On the evening of September 29, however, when he heard talk of the unexplained thunder, he did not wonder if one had crashed. To me he said, ‘We just couldn’t imagine it could happen here. Only in Säo Paulo or places like that.’ Indeed, the airplanes that passed overhead were in the least critical phase of flight, cruising high and straight through the cold clean sky, unstressed, and organically resistant to almost any error their crews might make. But then Riebero received a radiophone call from an official he knew, who said, ‘Ademir, there is a Gol airplane that has disappeared, and it seems to have gone down near you.’ Gol is a discount airline named after the drawn-out victory cry in soccer – G-O-O-O-O-L!!!

  Riebero switched on the television news and saw a map labeled Jarinã on the screen. It was odd how this authenticated the situation in his mind. From the lack of reports from the outstations, he surmised that the airplane had not crashed on the ranch’s holdings. But given the size and density of the bordering jungle, it was not surprising that an entire Boeing could have disappeared.

  Later that night, with more radiophone calls coming in, Riebero heard that workers at the neighboring farm had seen an airplane fall. These are the only known eyewitnesses to the accident. The farm where they live and work is small compared with Fazenda Jarinã, but large nonetheless. As something of a plaything it is luxurious and extremely well kept. It belongs to a twenty-four-year-old man in São Paulo, to whom it was gifted by his grandfather. Being rich can be especially pleasant in Brazil – and the Amazon, let’s face it, looks better after it is cut down. The workers were laying a new brick wall when they heard a roar and spotted the Boeing perhaps a dozen miles to the east. It was pointed straight down and seemed to be wobbling and trailing a cloud. At that distance the airplane looked just a few inches long. It disappeared over a tree line and into the forests beyond. No dust or smoke rose into the sky. Some seconds later came the thunder. The workers ran to find their boss, who hurried to a radio and made the first call. That night people at the farm had a hard time sleeping.

  Riebero had a long night as well. The Brazilian Air Force called asking to use Fazenda Jarinã for rescue and recovery operations once the airplane was found. Riebero acquiesced because the ranch had the facilities to handle a crowd. God willing, the crowd would include survivors. At 11 PM a four-engine Hercules lumbered overhead and began searching through the darkness to the east, ultimately without success: the Boeing’s emergency locator transmitter had apparently failed, because no homing signal was received. The Air Force kept calling Riebero to keep him abreast. Riebero finally switched off the radiophone to catch some rest. He got up at dawn. For a while the morning was calm, but at 8:30 another Hercules flew low overhead, equipped with a magnetometer of use in detecting metal masses. At 9 AM, Riebero heard that the wreckage had been found. It lay in heavy forest on Caiapó territory, and was almost impossible to see from above. Air Force helicopters began to settle onto the ranch’s soccer field. A rescue team went out, rappelled down to the crash site, and came back with the news that there would be no survivors. The scene was grim. One hundred and fifty-four people had died. They were innocent men, women, and children. People are insignificant blips on the scale of history, but th
ese had not died peacefully, as one might wish. They had endured a period of absolute terror, and had been torn apart by the force of the impact. It was the worst accident in Brazil’s long aviation history.

  *

  The recovery operation began with the clearing of a helipad in the forest. When word came to the Caiapós that the Boeing lay on their land, Megaron mobilized twenty-two men – warriors all – and drove to Fazenda Jarinã, where they launched two aluminum boats into the Jarinã River and set off downstream, a full day’s travel to the site. The Caiapós wanted to help. Their shaman was with them. The heavens had rained ruin into their trees. They did not believe that people are insignificant blips in history. They believed that in a parallel world in the forest 154 tortured souls were crying out for tending.

  A thousand miles to the south on the afternoon of September 29, a few hours before the Boeing’s impact, two American pilots were preparing to fly home in a brand-new business jet made by the Brazilian manufacturer Embraer. The airplane stood gleaming in the sunshine at the Embraer plant in São José dos Campos, near São Paulo. It was a Legacy 600, an imposing $25 million beauty capable of accommodating thirteen passengers in luxury at 41,000 feet, at more than 500 miles an hour, and, with a reduced passenger load, of flying 3,700 miles between stops. The Legacy occupies a position toward the high end of private jets – among airplanes like Gulfstreams, Challengers, and Falcons – which by political, ethical, and environmental measures are abhorrent creations, but which nonetheless are masterworks of personal transportation. The Legacy weighs 50,000 pounds fully loaded, and is powered by twin Rolls-Royce turbofan engines mounted aft against the fuselage, delivering a total of 16,000 pounds of thrust at a price to the atmosphere and global oil reserves of about 300 gallons an hour. It has a high T-tail and thin swept-back wings which span 69 feet and turn upward at the tips into graceful winglets – six-foot vertical extensions meant to tame the airflow and improve efficiency (entirely in relative terms). It has a cockpit with the latest in electronics and instrumentation, including a Flight Management System computer, ultra-accurate GPS receivers, strong radios, a superb autopilot, and the ultimate in onboard collision-avoidance devices. It has a cabin equipped with a full galley (personal flight attendant suggested), an entertainment system, a satellite phone, a large lavatory, and three distinct seating areas, including one in the back that can be converted into a private bedroom. If you insist on treating yourself really well, and at considerable cost, flying in a Legacy comes highly recommended.

  This one had been bought by a Long Island-based aircraft-management company called ExcelAire, which planned to charter it out as a global air taxi. It had been given an American registration, N600XL, which in radio phonetics would become November Six Hundred X-ray Lima. The ‘XL’ referred to ExcelAire. Over the days preceding the homeward flight, four company employees had inspected the airplane before consummating the purchase. The employees included two ExcelAire vice presidents and the flight crew – the captain, Joseph Lepore, aged forty-two, and his copilot, Jan Paul Paladino, age thirty-four. Lepore had a reputation for being a pleasant man who had always wanted only to fly; Paladino was said to be more articulate and perhaps to have a quicker mind. Neither pilot spoke Portuguese or demonstrated much enthusiasm for Brazil beyond the standard stuff about Rio de Janeiro. Judging from the cockpit voice recordings captured by the Legacy’s black box and later recovered by investigators, their English was New York-accented – and no less so when they enunciated for the locals. In the recordings, they didn’t enunciate often. But so what – English is aviation’s lingua franca, controllers everywhere are required to speak it to non-native pilots, air-traffic procedures are much the same globally, and Lepore and Paladino had signed on to fly airplanes, not wander around contemplating cultural nuances.

  These were the same pilots later pilloried in the press for having dropped off the radar to stunt-fly over the Amazon – an accusation that was ridiculous from the start and was soon disproved by the records of their flight. Lepore and Paladino were not the joyriding type. In fact, quite the opposite. Beneath their cockpit banter, they come across in the voice recordings as almost childishly dutiful toward their superiors and their job. In that sense they represented the industry ideal. They were also experienced pilots and officially qualified to handle an airplane of this kind. In the United States they had recently completed Legacy training at FlightSafety International, the world’s best-known private-jet flight school, where they had demonstrated proficiency in the various check-box categories. FlightSafety training is classroom and simulator-based. It is also stilted and formalistic – designed to impress bureaucracies as much as to impart knowledge to pilots – and is therefore less useful than it pretends to be. It is not, however, without value, and ExcelAire had gone still further, arranging for both men to fly a Legacy twice before sending them off to Brazil for the purchase. Additionally, during the inspection-and-acceptance process in São José dos Campos, they had test-flown the new airplane under the guidance of Embraer factory pilots and engineers, who had briefed them on the cockpit systems and provided practical tips. Furthermore, the copilot, Paladino, had previously flown a similar Embraer regional jet during a stint at American Airlines. And these jets are easy to fly. There was no reason to doubt that Lepore and Paladino would bring N600XL safely home.

  It was not a fun stay in Brazil. São José dos Campos is a dull town, and there were repeated delays as the ExcelAire team found small problems with the airplane, and Embraer technicians struggled to resolve them. Particularly difficult was a problem with flickering L.E.D. cabin lights, which nearly caused the purchase to fall through. Embraer treated the Americans well, and insisted on sending a staffer along for the first leg of the homeward flight, apparently to ease their exit from the country. Things didn’t work out that way, but the plan was to fly 1,725 miles north to Manaus, where they would spend the night in a good hotel and take a boat ride on the Amazon, before heading to the United States later in the day. Also along for the flight was Embraer’s North American sales representative Henry Yandle and a New York Times contributor named Joe Sharkey, who writes a business-travel column for the newspaper and was doing a story on another Embraer model for a U.S. magazine called Business Jet Traveler. Sharkey was the outsider among them, and potentially an influential one. It was unusual to have invited him on a maiden voyage with a freshly trained crew. But this was to be a rare run without a client aboard, or the shyness that typically accompanies the use of such airplanes.

  Embraer and ExcelAire welcomed the publicity. Sharkey was not there to write about the Legacy now. But he was well positioned to write about it in the future – perhaps. A description of the Legacy in Business Jet Traveler might help persuade someone to buy or charter one. It was hard to know what Sharkey could write of genuine content – that riding in a Legacy is comfortable? That the cabin offers legroom, desk space, and a walk-in luggage compartment? That the cabin lighting does not flicker? At $25 million it had better not. Anyway, Sharkey seemed a decent sort, and unlikely to delve into the airplane’s dark side – the fuel burn per passenger-mile, the expense to company shareholders, the disproportionate use of public resources like air traffic control and landing slots. No, it was a safe bet that Business Jet Traveler would not be publishing that. Nonetheless, Sharkey’s presence placed additional pressure on the pilots as they taxied the unfamiliar airplane toward the runway.

  It was just before 3 PM on Friday, September 29. Embraer had submitted a computer-generated flight plan to air traffic control for the run north to Manaus. Flight plans are trip requests, or advance notices of an imminent flight. This one was for a routing that would take N600XL over Brasília, where, after a slight left turn, an airway would lead the airplane 1,200 miles to Manaus. That airway is called UZ6. It passes over Caiapó Indian territory and Fazenda Jarinã, but of course the flight-planning computer did not know this, or even of the Amazon’s existence. On the basis of forecasted winds and the Legacy’s pe
rformance, it requested a climb to 37,000 feet, or Flight Level 370, an altitude appropriate for the initial direction of flight. Until Brasília, that direction was slightly to the east side of magnetic north. Airplanes cruising on such easterly headings are usually assigned ‘odd’ altitudes (35,000, 37,000, 39,000), while airplanes cruising on westerly headings are given ‘even’ altitudes (36,000, 38,000, 40,000). This is basic stuff, the vertical equivalent of drive-on-the-right highway rules. Virtuoso air traffic controllers sometimes allow exceptions to be made when traffic is light (and exceptions are systemic along certain one-way routes), but generally these cruising rules dictate the altitudes at which airplanes fly worldwide. The flight-planning computer knew it, and since the airway to Manaus required a westerly turn over Brasília, it proposed a descent to 36,000 feet at that point.

  Lepore and Paladino had a printout of the flight plan in the cockpit, with the route highlighted in yellow, and the altitudes shown. But a flight plan is merely a proposal, and it becomes something of an artifact after air traffic control mulls it over and issues a formal clearance into controlled airspace, assigning a route and altitude according to its own needs. Afterward the original flight plan becomes operational only in narrow circumstances related to communications failure. Lepore and Paladino received their clearance by radio from the control tower at São José dos Campos prior to taxiing. The local controller spoke the bare minimum of English. Lepore and Paladino eventually gleaned the essential: they were cleared to Manaus via a standard departure procedure and then the flight-plan route, at an initial cruising altitude of 37,000 feet. They were assigned a unique transponder code, which they set. The transponder is a radio beacon which responds to air traffic control radar, enhancing the display on the controllers’ screens and automatically transmitting the aircraft’s altitude in flight. Like most of the Legacy’s electronics, this one was made by the American company Honeywell. At 2:51 PM, with Lepore in the left seat and at the controls, N600XL accelerated smoothly down the runway and lifted off. I presume that Sharkey was pleased. He was embarking on a trip in the style of a latter-day pasha. Neither he nor the pilots could have known that at the same time, in the humble world 1,725 miles to the north, the ordinary passengers of Gol Flight 1907 were crowded around the gate at the airline terminal in Manaus, preparing to board a Boeing 737 for their flight south.