The wreck and the reckoning

The corporate plane was a beauty, a shiny new blue-and-white $25m Legacy 600 jet with 13 seats. I was in Brazil to write about Embraer, the aircraft manufacturer. David J Rimmer, the vice-president of the New York charter-jet company ExcelAire, asked me if I wanted to hitch a ride home on the plane, which his company had just taken delivery of at Embraer’s plant in Sao Jose dos Campos, near Sao Paulo. We would board the plane on Friday afternoon, head northwest into the Amazon for the overnighter at Manaus, then continue onward to the US. Also on board would be Rimmer’s colleague Ralph Michielli and two marketing executives: Henry Yandle, an American, and Daniel Bachmann, the son of American medical missionaries who had grown up in an Amazon river town near Manaus and who had suggested the side trip. “Sure, I’m always up for an adventure,” I told Mr Rimmer. That turned out to be quite an understatement.

In many people’s minds, a business jet is associated with corporate fat cats swilling champagne served by an air hostess with model looks. But the truth is, we were just working stiffs making a quick sightseeing stop before delivering an aeroplane to a company that had just bought it. We left Sao Jose around 2.10pm. An hour into the flight, I was studying a tourist map of Brazil. Ahead, we were approaching the edges of the Amazon jungle. Bachmann ran his finger along the paths of the rivers that descend from the high western mountains to form the great river basin. We were transfixed as he told Amazon tales from his childhood, of swimming in waters that teem with piranhas the size of poodles, with anacondas that can swallow a deer.

A little later I wandered up to the cockpit, whose door was ajar, and stood in the aisle behind the two pilots as the plane flew smoothly northwest. “She’s flying beautifully,” said the captain, Joe Lepore. Beside him, the co-pilot, Jan Paladino, kept his eyes on the controls. The altimeter read 37,000ft. (Later, the Legacy pilots would maintain that while their written flight plan called for the Legacy to drop to 36,000ft just after passing Brasilia, air-traffic control in Sao Jose overrode that plan and instructed the pilots to stay at 37,000ft – a command the pilots followed, according to international aviation procedures.)

Approaching unseen in the opposite direction, also at 37,000ft, was a Boeing 737-800 bound for Brasilia with 154 passengers aboard. I am not sure now how much time passed before the impact, but I do know it was enough time for me to take my laptop from its case and start transcribing interviews.

We flew on smoothly with only the insistent drone of the engines. And then “Bang!” Up front, Henry Yandle said: “We’ve been hit!” The noise was not “Boom!” Nor did I hear any roar of an approaching plane. I have been on an aeroplane that has been struck by lightning. I have flown in many military jets. I have never heard anything like this. I heard just a big metallic bang, the sort of noise your car might make if your tyre rim thumped into a pothole. Accompanying it was a concussive jolt. The plane did not lose balance or shudder. When I raised the shade, my heart sank. A 4ft section of the wing tip was shorn off, with just a jagged edge remaining. I looked up at the cockpit and tried to read the pilots’ body language. I saw two men – intense, alert, working in tandem like well-trained infantrymen. I saw no panic, but it was clear that we had an emergency. Mr Rimmer was crouched at the window, looking at the wing. “How bad is it?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said, forming each word like a separate sentence.

On we flew. In the cockpit, the pilots battled damaged controls and scrutinised charts to find a landing strip in the darkening jungle below. None showed. Having tried and failed to establish contact with air-traffic control in Brasilia and Manaus, they radioed a “mayday” call that was acknowledged by a cargo plane in the vicinity. He told them to look for a once-secret and now-obscure military air base somewhere nearby. I saw Michielli at a window, studying the left wing and taking a succession of photos with his digital camera. He looked stricken. A row of rivets on the wing had popped and a section of skin was peeling off. Fuel was leaking and we were losing speed and altitude. Nobody shouted anything from the movies like “We’re going down,” but it was made clear that we were. We stowed bags under our seats and strapped ourselves in.

In the cockpit, Lepore, a seasoned pilot, was looking for a slash in the jungle where he could try to ditch. “In aeroplane crashes, I’ve heard people say too many times, if only they’d put it down somewhere 10 minutes earlier,” he told me later. At that point they figured we had at most 15 more minutes before the wing gave out.
I thought of Nancy, my wife of 22 years; my daughters, Caroline, 28, and Lisa, 34, my son, Christopher, 25, my parents, my friends. We have two parrots, Petey and Rosie, that we adore, and I thought of them. I tugged a page from a notebook and scrawled three sentences to my wife: “I love you honey. Please always know this. You made my life golden and my death acceptable to me.”

I folded the page, fumbled for my wallet, and tucked the note in. I jammed the wallet into my front-right trousers pocket, figuring it wouldn’t be as likely to pop out on impact, figuring leather is less likely to be consumed by fire. Then I thought: “How much is this going to hurt?” Later that struck me as an imbecilic way to have wasted what I had every reason to believe was one of my last few minutes of life. Then I heard a shout from the cockpit. “I see an airport,” Mr Lepore said. His knuckles were locked on the dashboard. Below, as we began a wide bank to descend and at the same time lessen stress on the damaged wing, I spotted the brown gash in the jungle, a runway bulldozed through the trees.

There is a joke about flying modern planes, with their automatic controls: a modern aeroplane requires a crew of three: a monkey, a licensed pilot and a big dog. The monkey’s job is to fly the plane, and the pilot’s job is to keep the monkey company. The dog’s job is to bite the pilot if he touches any of the controls. That’s not the way it was here, with most of the automatic systems blown away. Those two pilots physically wrestled the plane down with all four legs straining at the brakes. They put it down hard and hot, and managed to keep it on the runway.

We came to a screeching stop, tyres smoking. Like a plane-load of tourists, we cheered lustily to have landed. Then, still a little worried about an explosion, we stumbled off the plane. On the runway we were surrounded by Brazilian troops. The sun was behind the trees, but there was still enough light to see the damage to the wing, and to the tail, chunks of which had been ripped off. How could we have walked away from this?

For three hours we speculated about what might actually have happened. Had we struck a high-soaring condor? That was my guess. Get serious, someone said. At 37,000ft? How about a hot-dogging military jet whose pilot had then ejected? Possibly, it was acknowledged. Or maybe we had flown into debris from an aeroplane that had blown up at a higher altitude? That was the most likely scenario, the pilots agreed.

The military treated us well. They assigned us to clean barracks with bunk beds, each with a Brazilian air-force pouch containing a small toothbrush and tube of toothpaste. Several of us were allowed to use a phone in the commander’s office. I had already been identified as a journalist, and when I went to use the phone it unaccountably failed to work. I managed to find a barracks with a computer where I talked a soldier into letting me type out a quick e-mail, though the system kept blocking me. I hoped the message would reach my wife, to assure her that we had some aircraft trouble and had landed safely in the Amazon, but not to worry. I had no reason to think she might have heard news that involved me in a midair collision.

Over a cold beer and a hot dinner, we talked about the near-impossibility of having survived. Someone joked that maybe we were all dead, and hell was an eternity in a military barracks in the Amazon, drinking beer and speculating for ever about the meaning of life. Acknowledging that we had no logical right to have survived a collision at 37,000ft, Michielli said gravely that we were now living on borrowed time. We dubbed ourselves the “Amazon Seven” and agreed that each year, we would have a reunion to account for how we had spent this gift of time. The pilots joined in this, but you could see their anguish. They had lost contact with air-traffic control after we passed Brasilia. “They told us, maintain 37,000ft,” Mr Lepore said.

But then, after a spurt of babble that neither pilot could understand, nothing. Dead zones and lost air-to-ground contact are common over that wilderness of sky. Brazil had recently spent $1.4 billion in an attempt to correct the radar and air-traffic-control problems, and had proudly bragged about this as a presidential election loomed. But international pilots have told me they fly those skies warily. “My mantra on the South American routes was ‘Fly scared, fly really scared,’ Robert Moser, a
retired captain told me. In countries like Brazil, he said, “there is continuous radio chatter in Spanish or Portuguese, and unless a pilot is familiar with those languages it is not possible to tell who the controller is talking to”.

Midway through dinner, Bachmann, the only member of our party who spoke Portuguese, went out to the commander’s office. When he came back 10 minutes later, his face was
pale. “I’ve just been told that a civilian airliner, a 737 with 155 on board [the Brazilians later revised the number to 154], went down in the jungle where we were hit,” he said.

There was no need to elaborate on the fate of those on the 737 even then, days before the wreckage and mangled bodies were found. The speculation was over. The pilots were sobbing. We stood for a long moment of silence. “We shouldn’t be alive. It doesn’t make any sense,” said Lepore. “I can’t describe this hurt,” Paladino said. “We’re alive because you two guys saved our lives,” I said. But the pilots were inconsolable.

We would spend the next two days together in an increasingly worrisome state of confinement – first at the jungle base, and then late the next day and all night under interrogation at the police HQ in Cuiaba, 450 miles to the south in the state of Mato Grosso. The crash had occurred over dense jungle just within the border between Mato Grosso south of Para. Even as search operations stirred to life at the air base, Mato Grosso police were making a parallel claim for jurisdiction in what, it became increasingly clear, was now a politically charged criminal investigation.

How could we have collided with a 737 and lived? Somehow, all those 154 lives on that plane had intersected with ours, and we hadn’t even known. The pilots had seen a fleeting shadow at the time of impact. Later, military pilots, test pilots and engineers would tell me that that’s all you see in a collision between two aircraft hurtling toward each other at the combined speed of about 1,000mph. It’s basic physics. There would be no hulk of an airliner heaving into view like a scene in a film, no Shelley Winters running shrieking down the aisle.

We were questioned all of the next day at the military base. Late in the afternoon, we were packed onto a military aeroplane and flown south to Cuiaba, where we landed in a violent thunderstorm with blades of lightning stabbing the ground, the sort of storm that usually closes flight operations. “Hey, what could happen?” one of our group said of the new danger. By this point, Embraer had gone into action. A vice-counsel from the American embassy in Brasilia met us at Cuiaba airport. I complained about being detained without charge and held incommunicado. We were sped to police HQ in a motorcade led by police vehicles with lights flashing. Outside police HQ was a group of TV crews, their own lights blazing in the wet night. Inside, an officious group of police and local officials in good suits gathered us into an office. A translator, speaking such bad English that I could barely follow, informed us grandly that we were involved in a police investigation.

We briefly made calls home at the airport, but there would be no more cellphone communication during that long, confusing night. Each of the group was taken into a room and interrogated separately. By now, few of us had any more than a few fitful moments of sleep since the collision. To and fro from the interrogation room came a US air-force colonel, the adjutant to the vice-consul. “We’ll keep it moving as quickly as possible,” he promised.

Later he told us we needed to fill out papers for the police, stating our full name, address, age, occupation, level of education – plus the names, addresses and birth dates of our mothers and fathers. “What are they going to do, call our parents?” I asked the colonel, who winked and said: “This is all bullshit. Just do what they say.”

I must make a stipulation here. In the military, headed for Vietnam in early 1968, I was sent to a CIA-run camp in the mountains of Virginia, where we spent three weeks in a simulated PoW situation. The final week was a psychologically intense period where we were all tossed into the woods without food (in the winter), then captured and made to believe we were PoWs. I believed it. (I saw senior officers break down and cry during this experiment, which later was exposed as an attempt to determine why US PoWs in Korea had broken under torture.) That experience, over 30 years ago, stuck with me. In unjustified detention, I was not meant to break or even be polite. In fact, I was to be a prick.

Around 3am, as I waited my turn in the fluorescent desolation of the reception area, an odd-looking man with hair that stuck out sideways, as if electrocuted, entered wearing a long white lab coat. He settled himself behind a desk. I was told he was a “forensic physician”, there to perform physical examinations on each of us. “I think you’d call him the coroner,” a secretary whispered to me. I noticed he had all our passports stacked in front of him.

Now I blew a gasket. I was not about to involuntarily submit to a physical examination by this character. Acting as if I’d been trained 30 years earlier, I loudly demanded to see the American vice-consul, who was then in the interrogation room where Rimmer was being questioned. He came out to see me with a wary look. “Unless you tell me I am required to do this, I absolutely refuse,” I told him.

The wary vice-consul nodded sympathetically. I looked at the coroner, who was smiling and sensually stroking a US passport, which I assumed was mine. “You don’t have to, and we will support your position,” the vice-consul told me. “But you may have to stay in Brazil a few weeks before we sort it out.” He said it was just a technicality, to show we Americans had not been tortured or otherwise abused.

I submitted to the physical examination, which was mostly an interview in which I replied to questions about whether I had been tortured. “No, but I’ve been detained without charges and am sick and tired of this shit,” I said. “But have you been tortured?” he persisted. “Not physically, but you’re making my head hurt,” I said. Next, said the coroner, we would need to be photographed to show there were no signs of torture. I could tell from his gleeful, ironic smile that we had stumbled into a realm where international politics was at play. For example, I heard somebody say the word “Guantanamo”.

And so, at various times as the long night wore on, we were each made to strip to the waist and pose, front, back and sideways, for photographs (which appeared in several of the more crazed right-wing periodicals and websites in Brazil). Earlier in the day, I had changed from my business suit into shorts, a polo shirt and a green baseball cap. By 4am, when it was my turn to go to the interrogation room, I was dirty, stinky, angry and defiant. I decided to keep the baseball cap on. As a prisoner held without charges, I was not in the mood for etiquette.

There was a long conference table. Bachmann sat on one side, and another Embraer official nearby. The American colonel sat close by in a folding chair. In a chair facing me was a pretty Brazilian woman who appeared to be in her late thirties, though she had braces on her teeth. She was the interpreter. The interrogator – who looked put out by my shorts and baseball cap but didn’t mention the affront (even though at some point when I crossed my legs I believe a defiant testicle poked out) – was a high-ranking police commander whose name I got and promptly forgot. He wore a suit and a mustard-coloured tie and struck me as the sort of fellow whose office they send you to when you buy a car from a showroom, to discuss additional options such as rust-proofing and tinted windscreens.

Here’s how it went. The police commander would clear his throat and pose a lengthy question in Portuguese to the pretty interpreter. I would then face her politely while she repeated the question in not quite proficient English. I would then answer fully and honestly to the interpreter. She would translate my answer to the police commander. He would then turn to a fellow sitting just to his right at a big hooded metal machine that looked like a cheap garden barbecue, except it had a keyboard. The man at the keyboard typed away.

My interview took about an hour. At the end, the odd machine slowly printed out a transcript of what I had supposedly said. I was made to initial each page of the Portuguese-language transcript and sign it at the end. The colonel advised everyone to add the words “I neither write nor understand Portuguese” beside our signatures. When we were finished, around 5.30am on Sunday, we were flown back to Sao Jose. There were tears on this flight. Though we hadn’t had access to the news, to the horrible loss of life in the jungle, to the grim rescue operations in an area where native Indians had to slash paths in for the bodies to be brought out, the enormity of the loss of human life was staggering to us.

We were put up at a hotel that claimed to have internet access. I called my wife and said I would stay for another few days to write the story, even though the internet connection mysteriously failed to work. I decided to take a walk in Sao Jose to find an internet cafe. What I found was an ugly city beholden to highways. I crossed a pedestrian bridge over a four-lane highway and realised that someone was following me.

Knowing about the high crime rate in urban Brazil, I worried that I was about to be robbed. I made a wide turn, with the stranger still on my tail but keeping his distance. This was no robber. It was a cop. Back on the bridge, just to be sure, I abruptly turned around and again passed my pursuer, who retreated to the railing and pretended to use his cellphone. Turning back toward the hotel again, I said to him as I passed: “I got you made, dirtbag.” Back in my hotel room I laughed sadly at my linguistic folly. How could a Brazilian cop with limited English translate this ridiculous phrase from some cop movie?

I called my wife again. Nancy is a senior editor at The New York Times, and in a crisis she is a field general whom I would follow through the gates of hell, as the US marines say. She said: “Listen, you have to get out of there today.” And so I did. I flew out that night. It was a good thing I did, because the bureaucracy (my hapless police tail aside) did not work on Sundays – but by the next morning they would probably have decided I should be detained as a material witness.

My all-night flight arrived back in New York around 6.30am the next day. I was overjoyed to see waiting for me my wife with my grandson, Remy, whom she had been baby-sitting. A Brazilian TV crew, lights blazing, was waiting at the arrival door, and they stepped between me, my wife and my grandson, to demand an explanation of what we had done. From their tone, I realised that those of us who survived were being cast as villains – arrogant and callous toward those who died. It also became clear that a criminal investigation might begin.

During the next few days, it hit home how violent the reaction had been in Brazil, where much of the media went into an anti-American frenzy. To my astonishment, the narrative as it played out in Brazil was this: fat-cat Americans in corporate jet, flying at incorrect altitude and ignoring air-traffic-control orders, kill 154 innocents in midair collision with Brazilian airliner over jungle. After I wrote a terse report on the incident in The New York Times, I was deluged with vicious e-mails from Brazil, with phrases like “Die Assassin” and “You Will Pay for This” in the heading. Several hundred of them ended with the same two declarations (only one of which I dispute): “You are such a shit of a journalist!” and “We have no Guantanamo in Brazil.”

On my personal blog, the hate mail poured in. Unbeknown to me, my daughter, Caroline, Remy’s mother, added her comments: “Please do not doubt that the survivors on the Legacy were devastated as they learned of the horrible crash of the 737. We can only wait for answers. It is a blessing to have my father alive, but those moments when we did not know he was alive have made me feel how emotional this experience is for Brazilians… My family will never stop feeling a tragic connection with you and your families, and every moment I have left with my father on this earth is a reminder of how fortunate I am, and how universal grief is.”

I rarely dream, and before now I have never had a recurring dream, but eight weeks on I still wake up several times a night with the image of that busted plane wing and the feeling of sinking into the Amazon. I now realise the virulence of anti-Americanism, and for a good part of that I blame George Bush and cronies for the Iraq war and the torture atrocities. But I have flown numerous times since the accident, without apprehension.

According to leaked information in a Brazilian newspaper, the investigation has concluded that faulty air-traffic control was the cause of the disaster. The Amazon Seven, and especially the pilots, have maintained that, as far as we knew, we had done nothing wrong. At several points, the Brazilian defence minister – whose agency is in charge both of maintaining air-traffic control and of investigating aviation accidents – suggested that our pilots had turned off electronic gear in the cockpit to render us invisible to air-traffic control, to enable us to do “trick manoeuvres” in the new plane.

I realise now that Brazil is a Third World country pretending to be a First World one. To insult Brazil’s air-traffic control was to insult the honour of Brazil itself. Meanwhile, the poor families of those who perished got no assistance from the Brazilian government. On October 30 the Brazilian military, under increasing pressure, ordered 10 air-traffic controllers to testify. All 10 delivered a doctor’s note saying they were all under psychiatric care and not available to testify. As we would say in America, they called in sick.

The fallout continues. On November 6, while the investigation dragged on in Brazil, a lawsuit was filed in New York, on behalf of the families of 10 passengers on the Gol 737, charging the pilots with negligence and “failing to fly at the proper altitude in accordance with the flight plan”. A Brazilian air-traffic controller, interviewed anonymously in a Brazilian newspaper, has admitted: “Everyone knows there are problems with the radars and equipment in that region.” He talked about mistakes being made, “tackling problems on the fly”, running risks. He said he heard two of his colleagues (who are among those now off sick) crying and saying:
“I killed those people.” Other reports have talked about long working hours, ridiculous workloads.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian authorities continue to insist their air-traffic-control system is the best in the world. At the time of writing, our pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, remain in Brazil, where their passports were confiscated the day after I left. They have not been charged.

I have written repeatedly since then that they are being detained, for which the Brazilian authorities have denounced me as “flippant”. They are not being detained, the Brazilian police insist. So, are they free to go? Well… no