Tragedy at Congonhas, As I Saw It

Cresting the hill on Avenida dos Bandeirantes that leads to São Paulo’s Congonhas Airport, I saw the dense black smoke, blown sideways by the wind. When I ascended the driveway, I was confused. At that moment, the burning warehouse of Transportes Aéreos Marília (TAM), Brazil’s largest airline, looked like any of a dozen building fires I had seen on the evening news. But the severed tail of a TAM Airbus 320 protruded from the warehouse, signaling that the 176 people on board were surely dead.

Approximately 40 minutes earlier, I had exited the bathroom to find two large clusters of colleagues in the newsroom of Folha de São Paulo. The first surrounded an Internet video of someone apparently holding a press conference. Unable to understand what he was saying, I moved on to the other group sitting around a television set that depicted a fiery but indiscernible image. “An airplane crashed,” someone said in Portuguese. Suddenly, our editor Denise started screaming reporters’ names and the newsroom plunged into frenetic activity. Vinicius, a reporter, stopped by my desk. “Want to come?” he asked. Five minutes later we were in a car, weaving furiously through heavy traffic on sodden streets as Laura, another reporter, bellowed obscenities of incredulity at the radio reports.

A TAM Airlines plane had skidded off the runway, over Avenida Washington, and into the warehouse, bursting into flames. Radio news correspondents didn’t know whether the plane had carried passengers or cargo, or the extent of the damage. “They don’t know anything!” yelled Laura. As we neared the crash site, the picture became clearer as the smoke grew darker. The plane had carried 176 passengers and people were trapped in the warehouse. The radio news program was tentatively blaming the crash on the runway’s lack of “grooving.” (Grooves cut into the pavement to allow for water drainage). The airline had re-opened the runway on June 25 after renovation. Since then, the first rain had fallen only the day before the crash.

After we arrived at the scene, the crisis rapidly developed. Though the fire billowed less voluminously from the warehouse due to copious attention from the hundreds of firefighters on hand, a neighboring building soon caught fire. We smelled gasoline. The fire coursed rapidly through the building, until it entirely engulfed the soon-charred structure. The press and onlookers stole closer for a better look; I got within 50 yards. The second blaze culminated in a series of explosions that scattered our retinue and signaled the building’s collapse, which we watched in horror. The smoke and smell of burning rubber became unbearable. We watched as the firefighters struggled to move trucks and water-guns into position to fight a clearly unanticipated second blaze.

Heading toward the main building to interview witnesses, we observed a chilling landscape. Ambulances and emergency vehicles lined most of Avenida Washington Luís. Directly below us on the street, rescue workers had spread a huge tarp yellow tarp and covered it with empty body bags and back boards, anticipating the toll to come.

In the terminal, we met a couple awaiting the arrival of their 28-year-old daughter, who had been on another flight. “She arrived at another airport, thank God,” said her mother. “Guarulhos [international airport],” her father clarified.

Outside, we encountered André Marino, 26. He had been in the terminal, listening to the air traffic control tower radio, when the plane crashed. An amateur pilot attending private pilot school at the Aeroclube of São Paulo, he said that listening in on tower communications is “almost a sport” for air enthusiasts. He had not heard anything out of the ordinary until the crash.

“I was drinking a beer, waiting for my friends…listening to the frequency. I heard a noise from far away, and at first I thought it was just normal traffic, or someone had crashed their car. But suddenly people came running through, shouting ‘come, come, a plane crashed.’ When we got close and saw the scene, the plane in flames and smoke, the eight of us were paralyzed.”

The current estimated death toll, including people in the street and those trapped in the warehouse, is over 200 people. The warehouse, unfortunately, was a 24-hour post, and thus many TAM workers were inside at the time of the crash. Some eyewitnesses said some workers escaped by jumping out of the second story and running from the building. But many died inside. By the time the fire waned it had already gutted the entire building.

While television news channels are just starting to name the dead, the Internet already has asserted its role in chronicling the tragedy. Shortly after news of the crash made it onto television, users of Orkut, the dominant Brazilian social-networking website, had already created a “community.” By 1 a.m. it had more than 2,300 members. Just as Facebook.com and Myspace users memorialized the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings of April 16, Brazilians are already using similar mediums to ascertain the living and memorialize the dead.

This accident, the worst in Brazilian aeronautical history, comes at a particularly—and perhaps tellingly—inopportune time for Brazilian aviation. Last year, another major Brazilian airline faced tragedy, and revealed problems. After a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 collided with a private plane and plunged fatally into the Mato Grosso rainforest last September, investigators discovered that air traffic controllers were overworked and the system was in distress. Over the past month, epidemic delays, cancellations, and closings drew widespread media scrutiny and public attention.

As we left on Avenida dos Bandeirantes, we saw that a third building behind the first two was still on fire. I did not see a single body in the four hours I spent at Congonhas. I did not witness distressed relatives. But the sight of the flaming wreck and the amputated tail of TAM flight JJ3054 will haunt me—and Brazilian aviation—for years to come.

Matthew S. Blumenthal ’08, a Crimson news editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. He is interning at Folha de São Paulo as part of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) Summer Internship Program.