Airline Apologizes After Multiple Passengers Are Forced off Flight Due to Plane’s Weight Limit

The Brazilian Court of Appeals has ruled negligence on the part of two American pilots.

Over the Amazon rain forest, the Gol jet collided with an Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet owned by ExcelAire Service Inc. of New York. The pilots of the New York-based executive jet had placed the transponder and collision avoidance system on standby prior to colliding with the Boeing 737 operated by GOL Linhaus Aereas Inteligentes SA on Sept. 29, 2006.

The charges had been dismissed in 2008.

Prosecutors accused the pilots of accidentally turning off the transponder that transmits the jet’s location. The defense says Brazilian air traffic controllers should have informed the Long Island pilots that their transponder was turned off. There’s no indication that the Legacy’s control panel indicated that the transponder was off, and that controllers set the planes on a collision course.

The Legacy landed safely but everyone on the GOL jet died. Flight controllers failed to alert pilots that they were on a collision course and also did not notice–or communicate that the transponder was off.

The two U.S. pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino could get up to three years in prison after “a string of catastrophic errors committed by Brazilian air traffic controllers. In essence, they put and kept these two planes on a collision course.”

ExcelAire says that “the transponder issue is a distraction from the true cause of the accident, which is an air traffic control system that put two airplanes on a collision course for about an hour.”