RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – Prosecutors could charge two American pilots of an executive jet with manslaughter following the high-altitude collision with a Brazilian jetliner that apparently led to a crash that killed all 155 people aboard, federal police said Wednesday.
Police seized the passports of pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino, both from New York State. The two were not arrested, but cannot leave the country.
Lepore and Paladino were piloting the Brazilian-made Embraer Legacy 600 when it collided with a Boeing 737-800 above the Amazon rain forest near Peixoto de Azevedo in Mato Grosso state, some 1,100 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.
Gol airlines Flight 1907 crashed, killing all 155 aboard. The Legacy was damaged, but landed safely at an air force base.
Mato Grosso’s acting federal police director, Geraldo Pereira, said the Federal Prosecutor’s Office had ordered an investigation into “the possible commission of a crime.”
Mato Grosso state prosecutor Adriano Roberto Alves wants to question the pilots, as well as air controllers and other passengers of the Legacy, his office said Wednesday.
The air force said both jets were equipped with a modern traffic collision avoidance system, which monitors other planes and sets off an alarm if they get too close.
But Pereira said the Legacy’s transponder, which automatically transmits electronic signals that communicate a plane’s location, may not have been operating.
“Preliminary investigations indicate that the pilots may have turned off the transponder, that they knew the risks they were running and nevertheless they took certain attitudes that endangered the lives of people,” he said.
Judge Tiago Souza Nogueira de Abreu, who ordered the investigation, told the government news service Agencia Brasil that “the hypothesis of a failure by the crew is not discarded.”
Officials have told local news media that air traffic controllers had ordered the jetliner to maintain an altitude of 37,000 feet while the Legacy was supposed to be at 36,000 feet.
U.S. journalist Joe Sharkey, who was on the Legacy, wrote in the New York Times that shortly before the crash, he saw an altitude display reading 37,000 feet.
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