BRASILIA, Brazil — An air force investigation into a disastrous 2006 plane collision over the Brazilian Amazon found there was no sign that two American pilots intentionally turned off a plane transponder that might have prevented the crash, according to a report released Wednesday.
The 277-page report placed some blame on the pilots and on air traffic controllers in the collision that killed all 154 people aboard a Gol airlines Boeing 737.
An Embraer Legacy, owned by ExcelAire Service Inc. of Ronkonkoma, N.Y., was damaged in the Sept. 29, 2006, collision but able to land safely.
The report said pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino did not have sufficient knowledge of the aircraft, resulting in the inadvertent switching off of the plane’s transponder and the collision-avoidance system.
