Newsday, "Documents offer new perspective on Gol Airlines Brazil collision"
Two Long Island pilots involved in a September midair collision over the Amazon rain forest were never lost before impact and were trying to figure out an onboard entertainment system -- not the critical flight-management computer, as previously indicated, the voice cockpit recorder on their jet shows. Nearly eight months after the accident in which 154 died, the full transcript of the cockpit recorder has surfaced, and the 112 pages give a very different impression of the pilots' competence compared to leaked excerpts in the Brazilian media in February.
Those excerpts suggested the pilots did not know how to program their flight computer and did not know where they were shortly before the collision. But the availability of all of the cockpit dialogue has done nothing to reduce the controversy over the accident. Pilots Joseph Lepore of Bay Shore and Jan Paladino of Westhampton Beach were allowed to leave Brazil in December. They are now waiting for a prosecutor in Brazil to decide whether to indict them after a federal police investigation two weeks ago blamed them and air traffic controllers for causing the collision between the Embraer Legacy they were flying and Gol airlines Flight 1907, a Boeing 737 that crashed Sept. 29.
The transcript, prepared by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board for the Brazilian government, was submitted recently to federal court in Brooklyn as part of a lawsuit by the families of those killed against Lepore's and Paladino's employer, Ronkonkoma-based ExcelAire, and Honeywell, which made electronics on the Embraer Legacy jet. The San Francisco law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein filed the transcript, which previously had only been released to parties in the investigations, to prove their contention that Lepore and Paladino were preoccupied with trying to figure out how to operate systems on the plane. As a result, the suit says, they caused the crash by not realizing the locational transponder had stopped working. All 154 people on the Gol flight died.
