Fergie's Tech Blog

Brazilian Radar Outage Forces Flights Back to U.S.

An AP newswire article, via MSNBC, reports that:

A radar failure over the Amazon forced Brazil to turn back or ground a string of international flights Saturday, deepening a national aviation crisis just hours after the president unveiled safety measures prompted by the country’s deadliest air disaster.

Further shaking Brazilians’ confidence, authorities said they had mistaken a piece of the fuselage from Tuesday’s accident for the flight recorder and sent it to a laboratory for analysis.

The radar outage from midnight to 2:30 a.m., which Brazilian media said was apparently caused by an electrical problem, forced numerous planes heading to Brazil to return to their points of origin and make unscheduled landings at airports from Puerto Rico to Chile.

posted by Fergie @ 7/21/2007 06:13:00 PM