It is the kind of information to send shivers down any air traveller’s spine. When Brazil’s air traffic control software was installed in the 1990s, says Ernandes Pereira da Silva, technical director of one of the controllers’ associations, “the same plane would pop up at two or three different places on your screen, at speeds that were wrong by up to 40 per cent. Things have got better, but it still happens now and again”.
Brazilian civil aviation has been in a state of near-crisis since last September, when a mid-air collision between an executive jet and a Boeing 737 operated by Gol, a low-cost operator, left 154 people dead.
