"This airport is too convenient not to be used."

I wasn't planning on blogging about the plane crash that happened in South America but when I saw the quote that I used as a title, I couldn't help myself.

The most current article regarding the incident says "The airport is too convenient not to be used." said Vivianne Santorini, a 57-year old attorney waiting to check in for a flight to the central city of Belo Horizonte. "Is it safe? I guess not. But there are also risks driving your car and crossing the street and everybody continues driving their car and crossing the street."

Let us look at some facts here: 1) the plane couldn't stop for some unknown reason; 2) the runway was wet; 3) they hadn't completed the resurfacing of the runway; 4) the runway is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000 feet shorter than that of La Guardia. (I find this interesting because La Guardia is in an even more confined space and even they have been able to allot enough space for a proper landing strip...)

You all know how much I hate to fly. Thus the basis for my almost maniacal interest in reading any story involving planes. I find it extremely disturbing that officials seem to not care about the factors that went into effect to cause this disaster. The above mentioned points are all cause for concern individually---here all four are combined. While I can understand the logistics of rerouting all those flights and shutting down the airport, one has to question, at what point are they asking for another accident? This one was the third in a string of four plane incidents there this week, the second major crash related to this runway, and the fifth case of a plane going off the end of the runway.

A later quote sums it up for me: "Whenever lives are at risk and something can be done to reduce that risk, if that means shutting down this airport, so be it. Of course, it's going to create a mess, but you have to choose between messes and lives."

(At this time, I'm choosing to not even discuss the fact that Brazil's airports are all controlled by their military. That is an entirely different topic in need of its own post.)