Four-Year Sentence Commuted To Community Service In The States

The pilots who were involved in a collision between the Embraer Legacy jet they were flying and a Gol B737-800 in 2006 were sentenced recently by a Brazilian judge to a prison term of four years and four months. The judge then commuted the sentence to Community Service to be performed in the United States.

Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino had been flying the Legacy over the Amazon rain forest when the accident occurred. The Boeing went down following the impact, and all 154 people on board were fatally injured. The seven people on board the Embraer bizjet were uninjured. The pilots landed the plane safely despite substantial damage.

The New York Times reports that the pilots had been accused of turning off the Legacy's transponder shortly before the accident, and back on again after the collision. The pilots denied that the device had been turned off at any time during the flight in depositions to both the U.S. and Brazilian governments.

In the sentencing document, which ran 86 pages, the judge said that the pilots had not checked the transponder for over an hour, which he said was "an eternity" in aviation.

The pilots had originally been ordered to serve their time in a "semi-open" facility in Brazil, but instead they will perform an unspecified number of hours of community service in the U.S.

FMI: www.brasil.gov.br/?set_language=en