In a interview to Brazil's official government news agency, Radiobrás, Minister Jobim defended Brazil's air traffic control system and said comments that another air accident was inevitable were politically motivated.

"This is a game within the corporation, in other words, they're playing politics. We can't excuse this type of manifestation," Jobim told Radiobrás.

Jobim's remarks came in response to comments Marc Baumgartner, president of the International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers made to the BBC Brazil Wednesday at a seminar in the United States.

According to BBC Brazil, Baumgartner said "it's a question of time before a new air accident happens again in Brazil."

Baumgartner also harshly criticized the Brazilian Air Force, which oversees the nation's air traffic control system, for trying to punish the controllers involved in the Sept. 29, 2006 crash of a Boeing 737 operated by Gol Linhas Aereas Inteligentes SA over the Amazon, killing all 154 people aboard.

"The Brazilian Air Force invested lots of energy to arrest and prosecute its own workers but none to fix its (air traffic control) system," Baumgartner was quoted by the O Globo news agency.

The September 29 crash was Brazil's worst air disaster until July, when a TAM Linhas Aereas SA Airbus crashed into a warehouse in São Paulo killing 199 people. The second accident had wide ranging political repercussions, with many accusing the government of failing to act on problems exposed by the Gol crash.

Following the accident President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sacked Defense Minister, Waldir Pires, and named Jobim who was given full support to implement all reforms he considered necessary to improve the Brazilian air system.

One of the steps taken was to redistribute operations from Brazil's busiest air terminal Congonhas in São Paulo to other airports and drastically cutting flight delays and cancellations. Jobim is also considering the possibility of handing air traffic control from the Air Force to civilians.

However Jobim admits that to a certain extent the "feeling of lack of safely and chaos persists" and has repeatedly requested for support from travellers.

Earlier this week, a military court declined to indict five Brazilian air traffic controllers in connection with the Gol crash. Military prosecutors want to try four of the controllers on charges of breaking regulations, and the other one faces charges of involuntary manslaughter.

Four of the controllers and two American pilots who were aboard and executive jet that collided with the 737 still face charges in a civilian criminal court in connection with the accident.

A Congressional commission investigating air chaos in Brazil just issued its final report. The report excluded a request to indict four air traffic controllers in connection with the Gol crash but supported the indictment of American pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino.

Mercopress

This is the understanding of Ulisses Fontenele, the former president of the ABCTA (Associação Brasileira dos Controladores de Tráfego Aéreo – Brazilian Air Traffic Controllers Association). He has called attention to the fact that less than 10% of the about 2,500 flight controllers working in Brazil are able to speak English fluently. And according to Fontenele, those who speak the language do it because they learned English on their own initiative.

He believes that the US pilots Joseph Lepore and Jan Paladino and the personnel at Brasí­lia's control tower had a hard time understanding each other. For Fontenele, there was a series of mistakes that culminated in the collision. He compared what happened to the domino effect (in which a single piece knocks down hundreds of others) and said that the tragedy might have been avoided if a single error in the sequence had not been made.

"If there was no trouble with the English when they took off there would be no accident. But there was an endless number of errors. If only one of them had been eliminated we wouldn't have any accident," he stated.

Fontenele says that nowadays Brazilian flight controllers have a six-month course where they learn some English language phraseology. The classes, which are part of what people learn to become a flight controller, teach typical terms of air control and some lingo and jargon.

"After that, depending on where the professional is going to work, he doesn't get any recycling or refreshing course. In six months there is very little you can learn. You learn the basic of the basic. This is a very big flaw in controllers' training."

The former controller believes that the little knowledge of English is not enough when a flight controller has do deal with an abnormal situation as the one with the Legacy. "If something out of  the ordinary happens, the flight controller may not be able to communicate in English. After all, all he learned were typical and basic flight control phrases for when everything is normal in the air."

Fontenele recalled another situation, albeit not tragic, which occurred decades ago, and also had to do with communications difficulty between foreign pilots and Brazilian controllers. He mentioned the story of an American pilot who was flying to Rio de Janeiro and informed the control tower that there was a fire in the soil, which can be translated as solo.

Since the word "solo" in Portuguese means earth's surface but also floor, the controller understood that the airplane's floor was on fire and forced the plane into an emergency landing in Brasí­lia.

According to the Brazilian Air Force's social communication office, since 2004 there have been agreements with English-teaching schools to improve the flight controllers' knowledge of English. That office also informed that only English-speaking controllers work with international flights.