No Sole Cause of Brazil Crash

As the Canadian Transportation Safety Board finished retrieving information from three black boxes recovered from jets that collided over the Amazon jungle, the official who runs Brazil's airports said the pilots of both planes and air traffic controllers all contributed to the deadly accident.

Brig. José Carlos Pereira, president of Infraero, the Brazilian government corporation responsible for running the nation's commercial airports, told the newspaper O Globo that at least six people may have directly or indirectly caused the Sept. 29 collision: the four pilots of the two jets and two flight controllers. The crash killed 154.

He did not specify what the pilots of Gol Airlines Flight 1907 pilots or controllers might have done wrong. But he has said previously the two Long Island pilots were flying at the wrong altitude and not the one specified in their flight plan. And he did not elaborate about the controllers, but they have come under increasing criticism for not diverting the Gol Boeing 737 out of the path of the Legacy after its location transponder did not operate properly and radio contact was lost with the jet for more than an hour before the impact.

"It is obvious that it [the control tower] could have changed the plane direction, but what happened was not that simple," Pereira said.

John Cottreau, spokesman for the Canadian safety board, said yesterday, "the downloading of the recordings was completed today" and the Brazilian officials who had come to Ottawa to oversee the process were heading home today.

The Brazilian official in charge of the probe said he will make immediate recommendations for changes in the way air traffic is handled in his country. Col. Rufino Ant"nio da Silva Ferreira, chief of Brazil's Division of Investigation and Prevention of Air Accidents and president of the commission investigating the collision, told Brazilian reporters Sunday in Ottawa that "there is always something that can be improved," including the air traffic control system.

He also was asked whether the voice recorder from the Legacy jet owned by ExcelAire of Ronkonkoma corroborated the statements by pilots Joseph Lepore, 42, of Bay Shore, and Jan Paladino, 34, of Westhampton Beach. In their depositions, they said they had been authorized by controllers to fly at 37,000 at the point of impact instead of the 36,000 feet specified in their flight plan. "The content only makes sense when it is cross-referenced with other information," Ferreira said. "We don't point out guilty parties. We find out the factors that contributed to the accident."

Canadian technicians transcribed the voice cockpit recorder on the Legacy and retrieved electronic flight data from that plane and the Gol Boeing over several days. The information on a fourth black box, the Gol's cockpit voice recorder, has not been heard because part of it was dislodged in the crash.

Veja, a weekly Brazilian magazine, reported another possible cause. It said sources had pointed to a shift change in a control tower in Brasilia while the Legacy was experiencing problems. A spokesman for the Air Force told Newsday the article is "conjecture."

Staff correspondent Martin C. Evans contributed to this story from Brasília.

Black boxes are key

When a commercial jet crashes, often the best clues to the cause come from the plane's black boxes.

There are two types: a flight data recorder that keeps track of the plane's speed, altitude and other data, and the cockpit voice recorder, which digitally records two hours of conversation between pilots and controllers.

The boxes - which cost between $10,000 and $15,000 each and are usually orange rather than black to aid their recovery - are mounted in the tail of the aircraft to best ensure their survival without damage.

Following an accident, investigators from agencies such as the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board retrieve the information from the boxes, compare the information from them and then analyze the results to determine the cause of the accident.

- BILL BLEYER