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More problems follow Brazil's plane disaster
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published July 22, 2007
SAO PAULO, Brazil - A radar failure over the Amazon forced Brazil to turn back or ground a string of international flights Saturday, deepening a national aviation crisis just hours after the president unveiled safety measures prompted by the country's deadliest air disaster. Further shaking Brazilians' confidence, authorities said they had mistaken a piece of the fuselage from Tuesday's accident for the flight recorder and sent it to a laboratory for analysis. The radar outage from midnight to 2:30 a.m., which Brazilian media said was apparently caused by an electrical problem, forced numerous planes heading to Brazil to return to their points of origin and make unscheduled landings at airports from Puerto Rico to Chile. "This is total chaos here. I have never seen anything like it, and it makes me feel very unsafe," said Eli Rocha, 52, of Oklahoma City, who was trying to board a flight to Dallas on Saturday at Sao Paulo's international airport. The flight was crowded with weary Americans arriving on other delayed or diverted flights. The confusion followed a nationally televised speech by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who tried to calm the nation Friday night by announcing new safety measures and saying authorities will build another airport in Sao Paulo, where an Airbus A320 operated by TAM Airlines crashed Tuesday, killing 191 people. Also Saturday, officials said they had mistakenly sent part of the plane's fuselage to the United States, thinking it was the flight recorder. Gen. Jorge Kersul Filho, head of the air force's accident prevention division, told reporters in Sao Paulo that the real flight recorder had been located early Saturday in the wreckage and would be sent to Washington for analysis, a process expected to take several days. Brazilian, French and U.S. investigators say it is too early to determine the cause of Tuesday's crash. Analysis of the recorded cockpit conversations is not expected until next week.
[Last modified July 22, 2007, 00:45:21]
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