After 10 weeks of detention mostly spent in a Rio de Janeiro hotel, Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino returned home to cheers and tears from a crowd of friends, relatives and supporters. …..
Rep. Peter King (R-L.I.), who pressured the State Department to aid in their release, said the charges were just a ‘face-saving gesture to explain why they held these men for 70 days.’ King said he doesn’t expect them to set foot in a Brazilian courtroom again. “

The only time you fly in accordance with your flight plan is on communication failure. The rule say’s after 20 minutes of the communication failure proceed to your flight as filled. The crash took place about 15 minutes after the failure. That means was not pilot’s error.

They can blame as much as they want to on the pilots, but the pilots didn’t do anything wrong and everything leads to controllers error. Sure everything that happened to the pilots was an anti-americanism act. They wouldn’t treat two Brazilians pilots like this.

Shows how bad the controllers in Brazil are. They complain about salary and infrastructure, but wouldn’t make any difference if they got all. They are really bad trained and they make mistakes all the time. Still an old military mind on the system and would take about 5 to 7 years to build a safe flying environment.

I study the case really hard and there is no way these pilots are going to be convicted.

The premise Philip has about being overly precise has some merit. To me, the problem is GPS technology and that degree of accuracy is being applied to an old airway system. You recall the airways were designed to provide navigable routes, not efficient routes. The VOR is straight-line and made sense at the time. This was a huge improvement over NDBs, of course. But, following any segmented, straight-line route, as are the current airways, does force everyone down a single pipe, thus increasing the risk of collision.

We saw some improvement with DVOR (mind cramp – is that right?) where we could plug in the offset in miles and degrees off a DME-equipped VOR to make a waypoint, thus straightening out the course.

The use of GPS to overlay the airway system is a great improvement over NDB, VOR, and DVOR, but it misses the point — you do not really need to follow airways to get to where you’re going. Of course, you do need to follow them for legal reasons and “that’s the way the system works” but everyone I know requests “Direct” at every opportunity. The FAA is getting there with the “Open Skys” program where everyone flys “Direct”. Certainly, some studies need to be completed to weigh the pros and cons, but getting away from the fixed airways is a step in the right direction.

This is a point that still not clear to me. I´ve read in brazilian newspapers that under international law the Flight Plan can not be overruled, and that in the loss of comunication the pilot should stick to the original plan.

Still, I´m no specialist, so I would like to read a fundamented opinion about that.

I also regret the way the american´s pilots are being treated, wich seems to me a bit of anti-americanism. Still, when I discuss this in Brazil people always point out “how do you think a brazilian pilot would be treated in US, had him hit an american plane killing 154 american citzens?”. That I can not answer, but reinforces my guess about the anti-american bias.

André, Brazil

The discussion about the two american pilots’ passports custody, decided by Brazilian Superior Court, can not be made under passion. We have to know exactly what local laws and regulations say about that situation, and what powers have brazilian authorities under that laws and supported by juridical decisions.

No one has completed any sort of investigation.

No one seems to know why these two men have been unable to leave, except for the practical one – they have no passports.

No one seems to be covering the situation at all at this point either. As I write this today, it is Day 52 for these guys. Most of the discussion are able the technical aspects of the collision.

None of the Washington alphabet groups seem to find this the least bit concerning although the Air Line Pilots Association issued a statement last week calling for the men’s release.

What are we missing? Or have these two guys simply fallen through some immense bureaucratic crack?

And what does the Brazilian government’s ability to grab two U.S. pilots – or two pilots from any other country actually – say about international aviation law?

Would the results be the same at this point if these were two British Airways’ pilots, or two business aviation pilots from Italy?

Since the 1970s, Robert Machol and others have documented the “navigation paradox” that maximizes midair collision risk if there is any human or hardware failure. In the Namibian collision (1997) the German flight crew accurately flew the altitude reserved for opposite heading traffic–a human pilot failure. In the German collision (2002) and Japanese near-hit accident (2001), humans on the ground failed and conflicted with automated TCAS hardware. In the Denver collision (2003), a bad solder joint prevented the ATC display of altitude on the controller station (disabling automated altitude conflict alarms), so the ATC warning wasn’t transmitted until the moment of the collision.

Flight operation regulations and aviation technology fails to implement fault tolerant collision avoidance systems that maximize the mean free path to collision. In other words, a fault tolerant system must use all available airspace volume in order to end the “naviagation paradox” that rewards inaccurate pilots with more safety. No airspace safety system can afford the extravagant waste of airspace volume required by the hemispherical cruising altitude rules, especially as the very light jet economic revolution takes hold. For a comparison of fault tolerant highway design to airspace design see http://www.geocities.com/rpatlovany/AviationSafetyMarch2003AsSubmittedUneditedWithReferenceLinks.html.

If nuclear science failed (as aviation safety science has) to recognize the applicable physics of the mean free path formula, it would be impossible to build a nuclear reactor. As long as aviation safety science refuses to apply the mean free path formula in midair collision safety systems, the “navigation paradox” will be an accident-encouraging fact of life. The Altimeter-Compass Cruising Altitude Rule (ACCAR) promoted in 1968 by the last of four articles (http://web.wt.net/~b1rd/Historical.pdf) on the subject in “Air Facts” by Leighton Collins (father of “Flying” editor-at-large Richard Collins) would have prevented the Brazil collision and would have saved 188 lives in over 30 easily avoidable collision since 1997. Currently, the most skillful accurate pilots are the most dangerous pilots after the inevitable human or hardware error has occurred, because of the “navigation paradox” designed into the current system. The ACCAR idea credited by Collins to an Australian aviator 70 years ago, actually rewards skillful accurate flying with improved safety, while allowing the totally inept ACCAR pilot at least the benefit of random altitude safety over the current system. Purely random cruising altitudes were proven by me and by Paielli to be five times safer than the hemispherical cruising altitude regulations (Figure 1 in http://web.wt.net/~b1rd/JournalManuscript.htm and Table 4 in http://web.wt.net/~b1rd/RussPaielliFinalPaperFall2000AirTrafficControlQuarterly.pdf).