Recovery crews on Thursday found another body at the site where a TAM airlines Airbus 320 with 186 people on board crashed into a building near Congonhas Airport, thus raising to 181 the number of sets of remains found in the charred and twisted wreckage and rubble.
The body, firefighters said, was found shortly after the search for remains was resumed, after it had been suspended temporarily Thursday morning amid fears that the building the plane struck could collapse.
The jetliner, which left the southern city of Porto Alegre bound for Brazil's biggest metropolis, skidded off a rain-soaked runway at Congonhas airport Tuesday upon landing, narrowly missing vehicles on a highway crammed with afternoon rush hour traffic before it smashed into a gas station and a TAM warehouse.
The impact caused a powerful explosion and eyewitnesses said the flames from the burning jet rose as high as 20 meters (yards). Authorities at the site said the accident had left the TAM building on the verge of collapsing.
Recovery crews, as a safety measure, decided to remove the wreckage and rubble covering as yet unsearched portions of the building, instead of continuing the search inside the structure, which was seriously damaged in the accident.
"With the help of cranes, we will now remove the material covering the spots that interest us. The priority now is the safety of the teams," Sao Paulo firefighters spokesman Capt. Mauro Lopes told reporters.
"The work now will be slower," he acknowledged.
"The expectation is to find more bodies, but we're not working with a numerical goal but rather a spacial one. Our objective is to examine the entire area until we're certain that there are no more bodies," he said in response to questions about the number of fatalities in the accident.
The number of confirmed victims stands at 184 if - in addition to the 181 bodies found in the ruins - one adds the three people working in the building at the time of the crash who were seriously injured and later died at nearby hospitals.
The total number of victims, however, could approach 200 because, in addition to the 186 people on board the plane and the three people who died in hospitals, there are still at least six people who are known to have been in the warehouse who are listed as missing.
The head of the Infraero agency that manages Brazil's airports, Gen. Jose Carlos Pereira, ruled out Thursday closing the airport that on Tuesday became the scene of the country's worst aviation disaster.
"It's not worth the trouble to close it. We can't make a radical decision. We need a middle ground. The issue is neither to close nor to completely open up the airport," Pereira told reporters in one of the corridors of the air terminal.
Pereira proposed as an alternative to the crisis besetting the Brazilian aviation industry the improvements in other nearby airports, such as the authorization to use the second runway at Sao Paulo's Cumbica airport, where most of the international flights are routed.
"We think that for March of next year, after testing Cumbica's second runway for rain (problems), we will be freeing it up and thus we will decongest traffic at Congonhas," he said.
Regarding the runway on which the accident occurred, Pereira said that it is in perfect shape and that flight activities there have been "suspended due to the police investigation, but as soon as that ends it will begin to operate normally."
The A-320 had skidded off a recently renovated runway, although according to some media reports it had been opened before the work had been completed.
According to specialists, a sheet of water forms on the runway when it rains making it difficult for planes' tires to grip the surface, and pilots said the runway still lacked safety features such as drainage slots to facilitate the removal of water in case of rain.
While the debate about the safety of the airport continued, another TAM plane, this one a Fokker-100, on Thursday aborted its landing at Congonhas at the last moment, but it was able to touch town without incident upon making a second landing pass.
The Fokker-100 came in a little too high to the runway, thus running the risk that if it had tried to set down it would not have had sufficient runway space to come to a stop, and so the pilot elected to give power to the plane, gain altitude again and go around to repeat the landing maneuver, which he accomplished successfully the second time.
Tuesday's horrific crash came less than a year after a Boeing jet operated by Gol airline went down in the Amazon jungle killing all 154 people on board after a midair collision with a corporate jet, which was able to land safely.
Until this week, that accident was Brazil's worst-ever air disaster.
