[SDCAL]

Today was a sad day in brazil, the country experienced it's worst airline disaster ever with almost 200 people killed when a TAM airline trying to make a landing at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport ran out of runway space during a rainstorm, sped onto a road, then crashed into a nearby building leaving everyone on board dead.

News articles describe the airport as being in an unusually urban area (for an airport) and as having notoriously "short and slippery" runways.

an excerpt from a cnn article reads:

"Tom Hennigan, a reporter from The Times of London in Sao Paulo, told CNN that flying into Congonhas "is like you are literally flying past people's living rooms in apartment blocks. Then you land on the runway. It is completely surrounded by the central part of Sao Paulo city. This is not an airport out on the edge of the city. This is right in the city."

In February, a Brazilian court banned large jets at the busy airport because of safety concerns. But there was an outcry about limiting the convenient, busy airport, and an appeals court reversed the ruling."

The description makes me think about how when i fly into San Diego from the east, it feels like you are so close to balboa park and the surrounding buildings you can reach down and touch them from your window. A cool site to see landing, but how safe is it?

Obviously SD and Sao Paulo are two different airports with two entirely differnet sets of circumstances, but the overall point is how safe is it to have an airport smack in the middle of a large growing city and should the masses who think it's "convinient" be able to sway politicians and city planners into overlooking the safety concerns?

When you are in a situation where runways can't accomodate lareger planes due to being too short and you have lawsuits between builders and the FDA about tearing two floors off the top of a building because it's in the flight-path and deemed too high, it's a sign your airport is in the WRONG F'ING LOCATION