Remembering a Solemn Anniversary: the Amazon Midair

While September often is a reminder of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it also represents another tragic anniversary for aviation. It was two decades ago, on September 29, when a business jet on its delivery flight to the U.S. collided with a commercial airliner over the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

“I have to say honestly that the memories are as vivid today as they were 20 years ago,” said industry veteran David Rimmer, then senior v-p of aircraft charter and management provider ExcelAire, who was aboard the business jet at the time. “I still do think about my survival every day.” 

The Long Island, New York-based company had purchased the Embraer Legacy 600, and several of its executives had flown to the manufacturer’s headquarters in São José dos Campos, Brazil, for the occasion. To ExcelAire, this wasn’t just any airplane delivery; the twinjet represented a milestone—its first new, wholly company-owned jet purchase. To mark the occasion, Rimmer had invited New York Times travel writer and BJT contributor Joe Sharkey along to cover the delivery flight back to ExcelAire’s Long Island MacArthur Airport (KISP) base.

The ExcelAire crew planned a tech stop in Manaus on the way to the U.S. along with some local tourism activities. “First of all, the airplane didn’t have the range to get back to New York without it, and we wanted a well-rested crew,” explained Rimmer. “We wanted to fly during daylight, and so Manaus was the logical choice, and then we decided to tack some personal time onto that.”

Brazil native Daniel Bachmann, a marketing executive with Embraer, had been asked to support Sharkey’s visit to cover the delivery process for the jet, and had accompanied him on one of the acceptance flights, which was required to test the aircraft’s systems. “When we heard of [ExcelAire’s] plans to be out and about in Manaus, I was asked by my leadership to join the team and serve as an interpreter, especially since I had been born in that city,” he told BJT. On short notice, Bachmann’s wife quickly packed him a suitcase for the impromptu weekend trip.

The delivery flight took off just before 3 p.m. from São José dos Campos-Professor Urbano Ernesto Stumpf Airport (SBSJ). Aboard were the two pilots, Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino; Bachmann and Embraer sales director Henry Yandle; Rimmer and Ralph Michielli, ExcelAire’s v-p and director of maintenance; and Sharkey, who was on assignment  Business Jet Traveler.

Half an hour later, in Manaus, a Boeing 737-800 belonging to Gol Transportes Aéreos departed from Eduardo Gomes International Airport (SBEG) heading to Rio de Janeiro, via Brasília.

None could have predicted their fateful rendezvous less than two hours later. In daylight, at an altitude of 37,000 feet over the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, at a closing speed of more than 900 knots, the two jets collided, with the smaller airplane’s left winglet slicing off approximately half of the 737-800’s left wing. The airliner lost control and crashed into the heavily forested Amazon rainforest, claiming all 154 lives on board.

“We felt the impact; it was unmistakable,” said Rimmer, ExcelAire’s senior executive on the trip. 

“I was sitting at the front of the plane facing the back,” recalled Bachmann. “I felt a hard impact that resonated from the front to the back of the cabin. Immediately, the cockpit alarms went off, and we all looked around, perplexed.” 

Seated next to him, Bachmann’s colleague Yandle looked out the cabin window and reported the jagged edge of the business jet’s wing. “We’ve been hit!” he stated.

Sharkey—who passed away in 2023—wrote in an article for BJT soon after the accident: “I was closest to the impact on the left wing. Suddenly, I was startled by a loud metallic bang, the kind a car makes when it hits a pothole at, say, 30 miles an hour. There was a sharp, concussive jolt. And then nothing. The Legacy flew on steadily.”

“We all proceeded to the galley and informed the pilots that the winglet was missing,” said Bachmann. “We had no clue what that impact was.”

“The shorn winglet was not the biggest problem,” wrote Sharkey. “A foot-long piece inboard of the winglet stub and aft of the leading edge was now coming off. Rivets had popped. Some fuel was leaking closer inboard. We all knew that we were going down, one way or the other, in the middle of the Amazon, in a damaged airplane with a limited time left to fly."

The flight crew declared an emergency, but with no response from air traffic control, they wrestled the controls of the stricken business jet for 25 minutes until they spotted an obscure military air base called Campo de Provas Brigadeiro Velloso, carved out of the dense jungle near Cachimbo, approximately 90 nm from the point of impact. The pilots eased the jet into a wide, gentle turn and brought it down in a hard landing.

“It took two courageous, skilled pilots to land that damaged airplane safely,” wrote Sharkey. “When we came to a stop, there was abrupt silence. And then we cheered.”

“We were greeted by Brazilian Air Force officers, who inspected the aircraft, inside and out. Only then we realized the tail [of the] fuselage was warped and the horizontal stabilizer fairing had been sheared off, maybe half an inch from its mechanism,” explained Bachmann. "We also noticed that the winglet was sheared, and the wing was bent back and upwards, causing the fuselage at the root of the wing to be warped. It also impeded functionality of the ailerons, which is why we could only turn right on descent.”

“The feeling was utter shock at seeing that the damage was far greater than just the winglet,” Rimmer told BJT in a recent interview. “At that moment it just felt like an incredible, inexplicable gift of survival...not knowing the tragedy that was unfolding.”

Sharkey noted that there was no sign of hostility from the Brazilian military as their passports were checked. They were assigned clean bunks in a barracks. 

“We were in a vacuum," said Rimmer. “There was no cell service, so we couldn’t access information on our phones or computers, and there were no cable news channels on the TVs. Not even a crawl on the bottom of the screen with news.” The passengers and crew speculated about what had happened, with the consensus being they had either clipped a small military jet and the other pilot had ejected, or an aircraft had broken up at a higher altitude, and they had flown through the descending debris.

Later that night, they got their first clue as to what had actually happened. “We were being served dinner,” explained Rimmer, “and [Bachmann] came back to the table. He had stepped away, and he said, ‘Guys, I have terrible news. There’s an airliner missing,’ and that’s when it started to sink in.”

The next day, reality further set in. “What was otherwise a pretty quiet base was full of activity, and we became aware that there was a search-and-rescue or search-and-recovery mission going on,” Rimmer added. “It became obvious that the airliner was nearby, and that they were using the base to muster troops to find it.”

He remembered being questioned by a number of unidentified individuals on the base that day before the entire group was loaded onto a Brazilian military aircraft and flown to Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso. There they were taken to the federal police station for individual questioning. “One of the officers needed help with translation of the deposition into Portuguese, so I did that for several passengers and the pilots,” Bachmann told BJT. “The air was tense, and the questions were insistent about everyone’s behavior and actions onboard.”

While all on board the business jet were shaken by the tragedy, it literally struck closest to home for Bachmann, who eventually learned that family friends and acquaintances from his home city were aboard the doomed Gol airliner.

The questioning went on for more than 12 hours. “They separated us into different rooms,” said Rimmer. “The U.S. Air Force attaché was in my room, along with a police interrogator, an interpreter, and a representative of the manufacturer. We were not represented by counsel. At the end of the conversation, I was presented with a document that was purportedly an accounting of what I said in Portuguese, and they wanted me to sign it.”

Unsurprisingly, a catastrophe of that magnitude quickly became a media storm. “Outside the police precinct in Cuiabá, were journalists and photographers that followed us from the airport,” recalled Bachmann. They spent the night there, and someone managed to get photos of documents from inside the precinct. The next morning, these documents were being shared on the internet, with home addresses and phone numbers. “My wife started getting calls soon after, and we also received death threats in the mail.”

Following that, they were released. While everyone else went their separate ways, Rimmer elected to stay with the pilots, whose passports were seized. A week later, he was advised by company ownership to return to the U.S. before his passport was taken as well. “I left feeling guilty, because I would have stayed,” said Rimmer. “It was my desire to stay with the pilots, but I did leave at the behest of the company and our attorneys and consultants.”

The pilots ended up spending approximately two months in Brazil. “One of the police investigators said that he was intent on throwing them in jail,” Rimmer said. “So we knew that that was sort of the direction they were heading in, but we fought for the release of their passports in court, all the way up to the Brazilian Supreme Court, where we won a ruling that said there’s nothing in Brazilian law that provides for taking their passports away for this accident.”

Despite the wave of anti-American sentiment stirred up by the accident, the pilots’ passports were eventually returned, and the Brazilian Federal Police questioned them one last time before they were allowed to step on board a chartered jet and go home.

Among the factors leading to the collision were the Legacy’s transponder not transmitting for an undetermined reason, disabling the TCAS, and a series of failures by Brazil’s military-run ATC. Several controllers were found guilty by criminal and military courts.

The American pilots were eventually convicted and sentenced in absentia by Brazil’s court to three years and three months of alternative penalty for failing to observe the “TCAS Off” message. But the NTSB disagreed with the safety investigation’s conclusions, and the specific charge—placing an aircraft in danger—has no equivalent in the U.S., making the crime non-extraditable.

It wasn’t until 2024 that a Brazilian federal judge finally dismissed the charges against the two Legacy pilots, ruling that too much time had passed for a sentence to be imposed.

The judge blamed the “lack of cooperation from the United States” for the lapse of time, which means that under Brazilian law, the sentence can no longer be enforced. In extinguishing the penalty, the judge canceled warrants and also ordered the federal police to have the pilots’ names removed from the Interpol red list, where they had been since 2017.

BJT reached out to the two pilots in preparation for this article, but while both remain active, neither responded.

In 2011, even Sharkey was convicted by a Brazilian appeals court, with his continued reporting of the incident causing what he described as a “bewildering array of charges that fall under the rubric of causing ‘dishonor’ to that nation.” He was fined $50,000 in damages and ordered to print a retraction in every publication where his alleged offensive comments appeared. Sharkey ignored the charges, including the one that insinuated that he was aboard the Legacy as part of a plot to “show that the aerial space [over the central Amazon] is a no-man’s land,” and that he somehow persuaded the business jet’s pilots to turn off its transponder.

There is one last survivor from this tragedy. After spending a year and a half on the ground in the Amazon as evidence, the Legacy 600, N600XL—which had less than 20 flight hours on its airframe—was written off and sold by ExcelAire’s insurance company. It was repaired enough to be ferried, first to Manaus, and then to Constant Aviation in the U.S., where it underwent a full repair and refurbishment, including a new wing, replacement of its avionics, and a complete overhaul of its Rolls-Royce engines by an authorized service center. It returned to service five years after the accident and has served uneventfully ever since as one of several Legacys in the fleet of a Mexican charter operator.

—Richard Pedicini contributed to this article.