Brazil’s busiest airport, Sao Paulo’s Congonhas, was the scene of the nation’s second major airline disaster within the last year. An Airbus A320 airliner crashed into a gas station and busy cargo terminal after skidding off the wet from rain landing strip and exploded in flames yesterday. At least 200 people are thought to be dead. 45 bodies were pulled from the TAM Linhas Aereas wreckage and speculation is that there were no survivors of the 176 people on board. The remaining casualties occurred on the ground. There were 170 passengers and 6 crew members on the plane.

Flames from the crash spread to neighboring buildings. Government officials said that at least 11 people were being treated for injuries at hospitals, where three died.

In September, 154 people were killed when a Brazilian Boeing 737 clipped wings with a private jet and crashed in the Amazon jungle in what was the country’s worst air accident.

Congonhas airport, located in the heart of South America’s largest city, had a reputation for having slippery runways. The airport recently repaved one of its runways after officials tried to ban wide-bodied jets from the airport on fears they could skid off its short landing strips.Some aviation experts questioned if the runway had been sufficiently grooved to drain water in heavy rains.
“The runway was reopened because of popular pressure,” Gianfranco Beting, an aviation consultant, said in a TV interview. “This was a tragedy waiting to happen.”

On Monday, a small plane also spun off the runway in a heavy downpour but no one was hurt.

Via / Yahoo!