Terror at 37,000 Feet: A Crash That didn’t Turn Out So Well

Pilot William Langewiesche writing in the January Vanity Fair:

There were so many opportunities for the accident not to happen—the collision between a Legacy 600 private jet and a Boeing 737 carrying 154 people. But on September 29, 2006, high above the Amazon, a long, thin thread of acts and omissions brought the two airplanes together. From the vantage point of the pilots, the Brazilian air-traffic controllers, and the Caiapó Indians, whose rain forest became a charnel house, the author reconstructs a fatal intersection between high-performance technology and human fallibility.

Via Wired’s Threat Level, “The piece is long, but a worthwhile read.”