189 dead in Brazil air crash

The pilot of the Tam Airlines plane apparently tried to take off again, barely clearing rush-hour traffic on a major highway. The death toll could climb higer, officials said.

The runway at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport is known to be dangerously short. Two planes slipped off it in rainy weather just a day earlier. Pilots call it the "aircraft carrier" - so short and surrounded by heavily populated neighbourhoods that they're told to take off again and fly around if they overshoot the first 1,000 feet of runway.

"What appears to have happened is that he (the pilot) didn't manage to land and he tried to take off again," said Capt. Marcos, a spokesman for the Sao Paulo Fire Department.

The plane was on a domestic flight from Porto Alegre. It cleared the airport fence and the busy highway, but crashed into the petrol station and a TAM airlines building, causing an inferno. Temperatures reached 1,000 degrees inside the plane, and officials said there was no way passengers could have survived.

"All of a sudden I heard a loud explosion, and the ground beneath my feet shook," said Elias Rodrigues Jesus, a TAM worker, who was walking nearby when he saw the jet explode. "I looked up and I saw a huge ball of fire, and then I smelled the stench of kerosene and sulphur."

TAM Linhas Aereas SA said 186 were on the Airbus-320 - 162 passengers, 18 TAM employees and a crew of six - and officials said three bodies of people killed on the ground had been recovered. There were fears of more dead on the ground, with 14 others taken to hospitals, where their conditions were not known.

Emergency workers have so far recovered 117 badly charred bodies, along with the "black box" flight data recorder, said Antonio de Olin, cheif of the police station at the Congonhas airport. He said forensic doctors were gathering information from relatives to help with identifications.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva declared three days of national mourning for Brazil's second major air disaster in less than a year. In September, a Gol Aerolinhas Inteligentes SA Boeing 737 and an executive jet collided over the Amazon rain forest, killing 154 people. Wednesday's crash now replaces that tragedy as Brazil's worst air disaster.

Presidential spokesman Marcelo Baumbach said it was premature to declare a cause, but critics have warned for years of the danger of such an accident when large planes land in rainy weather at Congonhas airport, Brazil's busiest.