The Flight 3054 from TAM Airlines, with passengers on board, skidded off the runway today, during the landing at the Congonhas National Airport in São Paulo. The plane crashed into a storehouse own by the company, located across the Washington Luiz avenue. The crash caused a big fire of great proportions.

The airplane is an Airbus A320 with capacity for 170 passengers that went from Porto Alegre (RS) to São Paulo. TAM has confirmed that there were 176 people on board. In an official note, the airline also affirmed that "at this moment we cannot determine the extension of the damages or possible injuries suffered by the people on the airplane, passengers and members of the crew".

Seventy fire trucks are working at the place to control the flames, trying to find and rescue people from the storehouse and from the plane. The accident forced Infraero (the public company that manages the Brazilian airports) to suspend all flights and departures from and to the Congonhas airport.

Yesterday, another plane - from a different company - also skidded at the same runway, but nobody was hurt. The cause of these problems (there were other "skidding off" cases on the past, but none was as serious as today's accident) is that the Congonhas' runaways have been going through renovations, and the grooving - the "scratches" on the runway's surface that prevent the planes from slipping - has not been done yet. When the runaway is wet from the rain, it's very hard to the plane's tires to maintain the adherence to the floor.

Just yesterday, the regional superintendent of Infraero, Edgard Brandão Júnior, was giving lame excuses for the incident with the other plane. He affirmed that the slip of the airplane had no direct relation with the absence of grooving. "In the same runaway and climatic conditions, other planes landed and departed normally. If we had more incidents of this type and they were recurrent, perhaps it would be an indicator", he said.

What is he thinking now, I wonder. The Firemen Department's chief, Manuel Antonio da Silva Araújo, has said he thinks that there won't be any survivors.

Source: Folha Online