'A Tragedy Foretold: Flight 3054' Recap: What Was The Real Reason For The Plane Crash?

A Tragedy Foretold: Flight 3054 is a 2025 documentary series from Brazil that is streaming on Netflix, with perhaps the biggest aviation tragedy in Latin America at its center. A tragic plane crash that killed 199 people on the 17th of July 2007, initially seemed to have been caused by unexpected and treacherous weather conditions at the Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo, Brazil. However, with every passing day, it seemed like there were more factors buried beneath the surface that must have led to the accident and plenty of people to be held responsible for their negligence. A Tragedy Foretold explores these reasons and the investigation that followed over its 3 episodes and does a decent job at telling the whole story.

What happened to the TAM Airlines Flight 3054?

The accident at the center of Netflix’s A Tragedy Foretold took place at the Congonhas airport in Sao Paulo on the rainy evening of July 17th, 2007. An Airbus 320 flight operated by TAM Airlines departed from the Porto Alegre airport as per usual, with passengers and cargo, and headed towards Sao Paulo on a routine run. Because of the heavy rain at the time, the air control authorities had initially refused to give the airplane permission to land at the comparatively smaller and more dangerous Congonhas airport, but they eventually informed the pilot that they were cleared for landing. It was during the landing that tragedy struck, as the TAM 3054 flight overran the length of the runway and crashed out of the bounds of the airport. In an even more horrifying turn, the airplane crashed into a nearby building that was being used by TAM Express as a warehouse.

The docuseries gives the whole matter a harrowing take by reporting it through interviews of individuals who were directly affected by the accident. Two fathers, Dario Scott and Cristophe Haddad, had their daughters, Thais and Rebeca, respectively, traveling on the flight from Porto Alegre to Sao Paulo and could hardly believe what had happened. Thais and Rebeca had recently become very close friends, and so when the former was about to visit her grandparents in Sao Paulo during vacation, the latter decided to tag along. Dario recalls how he himself went to see off the girls at the Porto Alegre airport and ensured that they had checked in and boarded without any trouble. When the crash took place, it was initially reported as a cargo plane that had crashed into the warehouse building, and it took some time for the revelation of it being a passenger plane to come.

Paulo Zani was working as an IT consultant at the TAM Express warehouse building at the time, and he remembers it to be quite a busy office, with 100-150 people working over shifts. He was preparing to leave the place with his friend and coworker, Wanderlei Silva, when he heard the loud sound of an airplane engine that seemed different from the usual noises he was used to hearing while working so close to the airport. But before Paulo or any of his coworkers could figure out what was happening, the massive plane crashed into the building and caught fire, making it a terribly deadly scene. Firefighters and rescue teams rushed to the spot, but the rescue operation needed a lot of time and effort. The presence of a gas station right next to the warehouse meant that the fire could easily spread and cause an even more horrific explosion.

Paulo and Wanderlei managed to escape the building safely with the help of the firefighters, while many others simply jumped out of the windows to get away from the extreme heat and deadly smoke that had now filled their office. Eventually, the entire building collapsed, making it impossible for the rescue team to reach the airplane and extract the bodies of the deceased. Absolute chaos ensued, as the TAM authorities delayed releasing the list of passengers who were traveling on the flight, much to the frustration and anger of their family members. The list was released some 7 long hours after the accident, and the families had to start mourning their loss without the bodies of their deceased loved ones. It took as long as 20 days to identify some of the deceased passengers, as very little of their bodies were left due to the extreme heat and pressure that they had gone through. Dario Scott recalls with grief and terror how the only piece of his daughter’s body that the authorities could give him was even smaller in size than her school ID card.

The fire could only be contained after 4 days, and the damage that had been caused to property and lives was immense. With the initial impact of the accident now starting to fade, people started to question the reason for such a horrific crash, and naturally it was apt to ask if there had been some sort of negligence involved in the matter. The CEO of TAM Airlines at the time held a public press conference and stated that there had been no lapse in the maintenance of the airplane or in any part of the operations, suggesting that the airline company was not responsible for the accident. Sadly for the victims and their families, the government authorities then stated that the facilities at the Congonhas airport could also not be held accountable for the crash. Thus began a long and arduous fight by the aggrieved family members to seek some sort of justice for their loved ones, as they wholeheartedly believed that 199 people had died in such a brutal manner directly because of the negligence of a select few.

What was the Aerial Blackout?

One of the primary reasons, out of many, behind the Congonhas crash turned out to be a grossly difficult situation in Brazilian airlines, which had been dubbed the Aerial Blackout. It all began with Brazil’s economy opening up and booming, with extra attention on matters of social and financial welfare. With the burgeoning middle class, travel and leisure became a common form of recreation for the citizens, with people who would mostly stay home throughout the year now suddenly taking trips as far as the United States once a year. To capitalize on this situation, private airline companies started cropping up in the country, offering cheaper flying experiences to those initial fliers that were getting used to traveling on airplanes. This quickly led to two companies, Gol and TAM, establishing a stronghold over the Brazilian airline space, while the more traditional and less affordable companies started to lose business.

But as it is always with companies that provide cheaper experiences at a large scale, neither Gol nor TAM was all that concerned about the safety of customers and workers, let alone their satisfaction and well-being. As a result of this boom in air travel, the number of passengers started to grow massively while the airports and flights started to become understaffed in comparison. Soon, air traffic controllers called out the situation and revealed that they were each having to control more than 15 aircraft at a time, which is beyond the international limits. They began to protest the unfair pressure that they were being subjected to, since their work literally involved the safety of all fliers, but nothing significant was done by the authorities. Meanwhile, the rush of customers kept growing, resulting in lines at check-in counters and boarding gates as long as a kilometer at times. There were simply not enough workers to handle the massive crowds, and the private companies did nothing to solve the situation that was escalating into a crisis.

The fact that the flight controllers in the country were overworked beyond a safe limit of operation was evident from a horrific air accident that took place in September of 2006, nine months prior to the Flight 3054 crash. A Boeing 737 Airbus operated by Gol collided with a private Legacy jet plane mid-air, leading to both aircraft crashing into the forest underneath. Not only were 154 people, including passengers, pilots, and staff, killed in the crash, but the remote location of it meant that most could not even be reached by their family members to get hold of the dead bodies. Following this accident, and the clear fault of the flight operators becoming evident to the world, the air traffic controllers went on strike, marking a complete blackout in airline services. Although the situation was later cleared through political and administrative pressure, the airline sector in Brazil was still severely understaffed in July of 2007.

What Was The Real Reason For The Horrific Crash?

By the time the official investigation into the TAM Flight 3054 crash concluded, multiple reasons were found to have caused the accident. Firstly, the government was, in a way, responsible for the matter because of the concerning state of the runway at Congonhas airport, along with the fact that it was (still is) located dangerously close to other buildings and roadways, right in the middle of Sao Paulo city. Runways at airports are required to have significant amounts of grooves on the surface of the tarmac to ensure that rainwater cannot accumulate on them and make the surface slippery. However, the runway at Congonhas had not yet been grooved, and although operations were technically not allowed at this stage, the authorities changed this rule since it does not usually rain in Sao Paulo in the months of June and July. Unfortunately, it had started to rain for days in July prior to the accident, and when the TAM flight landed, it skidded across the slippery runway before crashing into the nearby warehouse building. 

However, the slippery surface of the runway was not the only reason for the crash, as was made evident from the security camera footage at the airport, which was released to the public. Although the release of this video was not technically legal due to the ongoing investigation, it is suggested that the government authorities managed to get it out in order to ensure that the public criticism against them would stop. In the footage, it was seen that other flights that had landed before TAM Flight 3054, in similar weather conditions, had taken about 15 seconds to cover the area of the runway covered by the security camera. But Flight 3054 shockingly took 3 seconds to cover the same area, meaning that it was moving at considerably faster speeds than required or even regulated, and so it meant that the fault was technically of the pilots and the airline company and not the government agency, ANAC, which was responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of airports in the country.

There was definitely some negligence on the part of TAM, ranging from how they underpaid their employees and did not care about the stress and pressure that they were subjected to, to making the flights operate with full tanks of fuel only because refueling at a particular district was more cost-effective for them. But the most major flaw was found to have been on the part of the pilots, which was revealed when the black boxes were investigated and the conversation between the pilots and the ATC was gone through. The thrust levers on the airplane were found in different positions, which was because of a lack of knowledge on the part of the pilots, since the flight was operating with its right reverser pinned. To fly with either one of the reversers pinned is a fairly common practice with no risks involved, but then the thrust lever controlling this reverser, or engine, to put it simply, also needs to be moved accordingly while landing. The pilots on the flight were not aware of this, and they only changed the position of the lever controlling the operating engine, while the one for the pinned reverser was kept at a “climb,” or accelerate, position. This was why the plane never slowed down to the required limits and thus overshot the runway and went into the warehouse building. Experts in the docuseries argue that the aircraft manufacturers should install some sort of alarm to notify pilots about this disparity between the lever positions, meaning that even the French aircraft company, Airbus, was partly responsible for the crash.

Was Anyone Held Responsible For The Accident?

The investigation and then court trials regarding TAM Flight 3054 were held for many years, with their final conclusion coming in around 2014. Initially, three individuals were held responsible for the accident that had taken the lives of 199 innocent people, and they were Marco Aurelio, Alberto Fajerman, and Denise Abreu. Marco Aurelio and Alberto Fajerman were both employees at TAM Airlines, with the former working as the flight safety officer and the latter as the vice president of operations at the time of the crash. Denise Abreu was the director of ANAC, the government agency responsible for matters of civil aviation, and all three of them were found guilty of negligence, although the ruling was that the departments under them had not operated correctly.

It was because of this very reason that the ruling was challenged and eventually overturned, since it could not be proven that only these three individuals were personally responsible for the tragedy. There was simply no way to narrow down the names of everyone involved in the neglectful operations, and in another proof of the powerful getting away with no consequences for their actions, all charges against the three had to be dropped eventually, and they continue to live free lives to this day. Denise Abreu even appears in A Tragedy Foretold and tries to cleanse her image, but her further acts of corruption become evident from the interview. The accident was officially pinned on the two pilots, Henrique Sacco and Kleyber Lima, and it was stated that their negligence had resulted in the crash. However, the families of the deceased still question this ruling to this day and consider the pilots to have been victims of the same negligence as the passengers, although there is now no official way to prove this mismanagement anymore. 

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