Please Help Fellow Pilots Stuck In Brazil Come Home

[CAL EWR B737]

TO ALL:


Please help fellow aviators Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino who are essentially falsely imprisoned in Brazil return home to their family's.




Please read - New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey who was a passenger on the Legacy.

JOESHARKEY.COM


Recent news articles


Court Won't Return U.S. Pilots' Passports - washingtonpost.com



Click here: Brazilian flight controllers decline to be questioned by police about crash - iht,america,Brazil Plane Crash - Ame



I am asking for everyone on this forum, posters and lurkers to take a few minutes and help out some fellow aviators, union brothers and fellow Americans who need your help.

If you could please do two things you will be helping these men get home to their families:

1: Write to your Senator and Congressperson via the links below.

2: Call the New York Senators and Congressperson offices listed at the beginning of this thread. You will speak to staffers and it will take you all of five minutes. If these NY Politicians here from hundreds or thousands of concerned citizens maybe just maybe something will get done. It will take only a few moments of your time but in unison it will send a strong message. It doesn't matter if you're not a New York State resident.

Thank you in advance. Remember many of us fly internationally this could happen to anyone of us and if it did wouldn't you want your fellow aviators to help get you home?

Also I have been in contact with John Prater and he is going to meet with the State Department shortly he will also be calling Joe and Jan and their families shortly.




Click here: Write Your Representative - Contact your Congressperson in the U.S. House of Representatives.



Click here: U.S. Senate: Senators Home


Please click on the link below to see a detailed discussion of this topic in the Major Airlines Section.



http://forums.flightinfo.com/showthread.php?t=89348

 

[CAL EWR B737]

Stuck in a Bureaucratic Jungle after Landing a Crippled Jet
By JOE SHARKEY
Published: November 21, 2006
FIFTY-THREE days.

That’s how long two American pilots, Joe Lepore and Jan Paladino, have been detained in Brazil after a horrendous midair collision 37,000 feet over the Amazon on Sept. 29 that sent 154 people on a civilian airliner to their deaths. The two American pilots and five passengers, including me, were on a Legacy 600 private jet that collided with the bigger Gol Airlines 737. Inexplicably, we walked away unhurt after an emergency landing at a jungle air base.

Mr. Lepore, 42, and Mr. Paladino, 34, are holed up in a hotel in Rio de Janeiro, where they are essentially confined to their rooms to avoid the public because the reaction to the accident has had a strong element of anti-Americanism. They work for ExcelAire Service, a Ronkonkoma, N.Y., air charter company that had just taken delivery of the $25 million jet from the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer. It was being flown home to New York when the collision occurred. No charges have been filed against the pilots, nor has any evidence of culpability been produced. Yet on Friday, a Brazilian judge denied the pilots’ latest request to have their passports returned and said they must remain in Brazil till the government’s secret investigation concludes, which Brazilian authorities say could take at least 10 more months. Last Thursday, the Brazilian Air Force, responsible for both operating the country’s air traffic control system and investigating aviation accidents, released a preliminary report saying it was “premature” to assign blame. The report confirmed that the Legacy was cleared by air traffic control to fly at 37,000 feet, despite a written flight plan that assigned it to a different altitude near the impact point. Air traffic control instructions always take precedence over a written flight plan. After the crash, Brazilian Air Force officials and other authorities made assertions that the American pilots were doing illegal aerial stunt maneuvers to show off the new plane when the collision occurred. I have no idea where they got that idea, but the charges got an awful lot of mileage in the Brazilian and world news media. I have consistently testified and otherwise stated and written that the Legacy was flying steadily, in an entirely normal manner, when the impact occurred. There is no mention of the aerial stunt maneuvers in the preliminary report. Officials from the International Civil Aviation Organization, based in Canada, and the National Transportation Safety Board in the United States conducted independent investigations. Their focus has been on whether the crash was mainly caused by a series of human and technological failures in Brazil’s air traffic control system. The Legacy, cockpit tapes show, made 19 unsuccessful attempts to reach air traffic control before the collision. And as numerous international pilots have told me, there are radio and radar gaps and dead zones, especially over the Amazon. Furthermore (and this is a fact that was omitted from the Air Force’s preliminary report), the Gol 737’s flight plan called for it to be at 41,000 feet at the point where the two planes collided. But air traffic control instructed the 737 to fly at 37,000 feet. After the crash, there was turmoil in Brazilian air traffic control. Controllers, protesting what they called unsafe working conditions, staged a work slowdown that caused major delays. Ten controllers at centers in Brasília and Manaus at the time of impact initially refused to testify before the Air Force, citing psychological trauma. They began testifying yesterday. The full truth will eventually come out, but outside investigators are questioning whether the Brazilians are dragging their feet to avoid assigning blame to their air traffic control system. Investigators from the United States and Canada are not allowed to publish findings before the Brazilian investigation concludes. But the aviation industry has begun to speak out. The International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations issued a statement last week saying, “Only contradictory facts, rumor and unsupported allegations have been forthcoming from Brazilian government officials.” There is “no valid reason for the continued detention” of the pilots, it said. Robert Torricella, a lawyer for ExcelAire, agreed. “Enough is enough,” he said. Robert Mark, a former airline and corporate pilot and air traffic controller who heads an aviation consulting company called CommAvia, said he was worried about the precedent being set in world aviation. “The Brazilians just grabbed these guys from another country and are keeping them in detention without probable cause,” Mr. Mark said. “Why aren’t more people expressing concern about the effects this could have, in that some other countries start grabbing people for whatever real or imagined reason?”
E-mail: [email protected]

 

[CAL EWR B737]

Click here: The wreck and the reckoning - Sunday Times - Times Online

MUST READ!!