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  The recovery operation began with the clearing of a helipad in the forest. When word came to the Caiapós that the Boeing lay on their land, Megaron mobilized 22 men—warriors all—and drove to Fazenda Jarinã, where they launched two aluminum boats into the Jarinã River and set off downstream, a full day’s travel to the site. The Caiapós wanted to help. Their shaman was with them. The heavens had rained ruin into their trees. They did not believe that people are insignificant blips in history. They believed that in a parallel world in the forest 154 tortured souls were crying out for tending.

The Takeoff

A thousand miles to the south on the afternoon of September 29, a few hours before the Boeing’s impact, two American pilots were preparing to fly home in a brand-new business jet made by the Brazilian manufacturer Embraer. The airplane stood gleaming in the sunshine at the Embraer plant in São José dos Campos, near São Paulo. It was a Legacy 600, an imposing $25 million beauty capable of accommodating 13 passengers in luxury at 41,000 feet, at more than 500 miles an hour, and, with a reduced passenger load, of flying 3,700 miles between stops. The Legacy occupies a position toward the high end of private jets—among airplanes like Gulfstreams, Challengers, and Falcons—which by political, ethical, and environmental measures are abhorrent creations, but which nonetheless are masterworks of personal transportation. The Legacy weighs 50,000 pounds fully loaded, and is powered by twin Rolls-Royce turbofan engines mounted aft against the fuselage, delivering a total of 16,000 pounds of thrust at a price to the atmosphere and global oil reserves of about 300 gallons an hour. It has a high T-tail and thin swept-back wings which span 69 feet and turn upward at the tips into graceful winglets—six-foot vertical extensions meant to tame the airflow and improve efficiency (entirely in relative terms). It has a cockpit with the latest in electronics and instrumentation, including a Flight Management System computer, ultra-accurate G.P.S. receivers, strong radios, a superb autopilot, and the ultimate in onboard collision-avoidance devices. It has a cabin equipped with a full galley (personal flight attendant suggested), an entertainment system, a satellite phone, a large lavatory, and three distinct seating areas, including one in the back that can be converted into a private bedroom. If you insist on treating yourself really well, and at considerable cost, flying in a Legacy comes highly recommended.

This one had been bought by a Long Island–based aircraft-management company called ExcelAire, which planned to charter it out as a global air taxi. It had been given an American registration, N600XL, which in radio phonetics would become November Six Hundred X-ray Lima. The “XL” referred to ExcelAire. Over the days preceding the homeward flight, four company employees had inspected the airplane before consummating the purchase. The employees included two ExcelAire vice presidents and the flight crew—the captain, Joseph Lepore, aged 42, and his co-pilot, Jan Paul Paladino, aged 34. Lepore had a reputation for being a pleasant man who had always wanted only to fly; Paladino was said to be more articulate and perhaps to have a quicker mind. Neither pilot spoke Portuguese or demonstrated much enthusiasm for Brazil beyond the standard stuff about Rio de Janeiro. Judging from the cockpit voice recordings captured by the Legacy’s black box and later recovered by investigators, their English was New York–accented—and no less so when they enunciated for the locals. In the recordings, they didn’t enunciate often. But so what—English is aviation’s lingua franca, controllers everywhere are required to speak it to non-native pilots, air-traffic procedures are much the same globally, and Lepore and Paladino had signed on to fly airplanes, not wander around contemplating cultural nuances.

These were the same pilots later pilloried in the press for having dropped off the radar to stunt-fly over the Amazon—an accusation that was ridiculous from the start and was soon disproved by the records of their flight. Lepore and Paladino were not the joyriding type. In fact, quite the opposite. Beneath their cockpit banter, they come across in the voice recordings as almost childishly dutiful toward their superiors and their job. In that sense they represented the industry ideal. They were also experienced pilots and officially qualified to handle an airplane of this kind. In the United States they had recently completed Legacy training at FlightSafety International, the world’s best-known private-jet flight school, where they had demonstrated proficiency in the various check-box categories. FlightSafety training is classroom- and simulator-based. It is also stilted and formalistic—designed to impress bureaucracies as much as to impart knowledge to pilots—and is therefore less useful than it pretends to be. It is not, however, without value, and ExcelAire had gone still further, arranging for both men to fly a Legacy twice before sending them off to Brazil for the purchase. Additionally, during the inspection-and-acceptance process in São José dos Campos, they had test-flown the new airplane under the guidance of Embraer factory pilots and engineers, who had briefed them on the cockpit systems and provided practical tips. Furthermore, the co-pilot, Paladino, had previously flown a similar Embraer regional jet during a stint at American Airlines. And these jets are easy to fly. There was no reason to doubt that Lepore and Paladino would bring N600XL safely home.

Ot was not a fun stay in Brazil. São José dos Campos is a dull town, and there were repeated delays as the ExcelAire team found small problems with the airplane, and Embraer technicians struggled to resolve them. Particularly difficult was a problem with flickering L.E.D. cabin lights, which nearly caused the purchase to fall through. Embraer treated the Americans well, and insisted on sending a staffer along for the first leg of the homeward flight, apparently to ease their exit from the country. Things didn’t work out that way, but the plan was to fly 1,725 miles north to Manaus, where they would spend the night in a good hotel and take a boat ride on the Amazon, before heading to the United States later in the day. Also along for the flight was Embraer’s North American sales representative Henry Yandle and a New York Times contributor named Joe Sharkey, who writes a business-travel column for the newspaper and was doing a story for a U.S. magazine called Business Jet Traveler. Sharkey was the outsider among them, and potentially an influential one. It was unusual to have invited him on a maiden voyage with a freshly trained crew. But this was to be a rare run without a client aboard, or the shyness that typically accompanies the use of such airplanes.

Embraer and ExcelAire welcomed the publicity. A description of the Legacy in Business Jet Traveler might help persuade someone to buy or charter one. It was hard to know what Sharkey could write of genuine content—that riding in a Legacy is comfortable? That the cabin offers legroom, desk space, and a walk-in luggage compartment? That the cabin lighting does not flicker? At $25 million it had better not. Anyway, Sharkey seemed a decent sort, and unlikely to delve into the airplane’s dark side—the fuel burn per passenger-mile, the expense to company shareholders, the disproportionate use of public resources like air-traffic control and landing slots. No, it was a safe bet that Business Jet Traveler would not be publishing that. Nonetheless, Sharkey’s presence placed additional pressure on the pilots as they taxied the unfamiliar airplane toward the runway.

It was just before three p.m. on Friday, September 29. Embraer had submitted a computer-generated flight plan to Air Traffic Control for the run north to Manaus. Flight plans are trip requests, or advance notices of an imminent flight. This one was for a routing that would take N600XL over Brasília, where, after a slight left turn, an airway would lead the airplane 1,200 miles to Manaus. That airway is called UZ6. It passes over Caiapó Indian territory and Fazenda Jarinã, but of course the flight-planning computer did not know this, or even of the Amazon’s existence. On the basis of forecasted winds and the Legacy’s performance, it requested a climb to 37,000 feet, or Flight Level 370, an altitude appropriate for the initial direction of flight. Until Brasília, that direction was slightly to the east side of magnetic north. Airplanes cruising on such easterly headings are usually assigned “odd” altitudes (35,000, 37,000, 39,000), while airplanes cruising on westerly headings are given “even” altitudes (36,000, 38,000, 40,000). This is basic stuff, the vertical equivalent of drive-on-the-right highway rules. Virtuoso air-traffic controllers sometimes allow exceptions to be made when traffic is light (and exceptions are systemic along certain one-way routes), but generally these cruising rules dictate the altitudes at which airplanes fly worldwide. The flight-planning computer knew it, and since the airway to Manaus required a westerly turn over Brasília, it proposed a descent to 36,000 feet at that point.

Lepore and Paladino had a printout of the flight plan in the cockpit, with the route highlighted in yellow, and the altitudes shown. But a flight plan is merely a proposal, and it becomes something of an artifact after Air Traffic Control mulls it over and issues a formal clearance into controlled airspace, assigning a route and altitude according to its own needs. Afterward the original flight plan becomes operational only in narrow circumstances related to communications failure. Lepore and Paladino received their clearance by radio from the control tower at São José dos Campos prior to taxiing. The local controller spoke the bare minimum of English. Lepore and Paladino eventually gleaned the essential: they were cleared to Manaus via a standard departure procedure and then the flight-plan route, at an initial cruising altitude of 37,000 feet. They were assigned a unique transponder code, which they set. The transponder is a radio beacon which responds to Air Traffic Control radar, enhancing the display on the controllers’ screens and automatically transmitting the aircraft’s altitude in flight. Like most of the Legacy’s electronics, this one was made by the American company Honeywell. At 2:51 p.m., with Lepore in the left seat and at the controls, N600XL accelerated smoothly down the runway and lifted off. I presume that Sharkey was pleased. He was embarking on a trip in the style of a latter-day pasha. Neither he nor the pilots could have known that at the same time, in the humble world 1,725 miles to the north, the ordinary passengers of Gol Flight 1907 were crowded around the gate at the airline terminal in Manaus, preparing to board a Boeing 737 for their flight south.