An hour ago the airline released the list of passengers. Reading it to see if anyone I know personally was in it was surreal (luckily, nobody).

I was just talking to a friend who is now in the US on an internship. He's from the same place I am and now lives in São Paulo, so he's connected to the two end-points of the flight, and he takes that route to visit family and friends regularly.

The situation in airports in Brazil has been bad for a while now. There's a media frenzy about the "air crisis", but mostly it was about delays in airports, strikes of overworked personnel and pissed passengers -- economy in the country has improved noticeably in recent years, so the market has grown too fast here and there was no infrastructure in airports (control towers, etc.) to handle the demand.

After the crash it was revealed that the runway where it happened had been renovated, but the opening was rushed before the work was finished: the grooves in the asphalt for water flow will to be finished only by the end of this month, so the runway was only safe for sunny days. It was raining today.

These days I was watching a special feature on TV about the air crisis in Indonesia, another country that experienced a boom in the airline business (something like going from 7 to 30 companies in ten years) and how they're not handling the situation well and lots of accidents are happening. Brazil is far from being at that stage, but I did recognize some patterns. Tonight's losses are irreparable, but hopefully we can find solutions before we reach that point.

A commentator on TV brought some interesting points about the situation here. Turns out that the two airports in São Paulo are very overloaded, and his point was that it is so because all airlines use them as a hub. São Paulo is the largest city in the country, and geographically it's more or less at its center. When flying between any two major cities, it's always economically interesting to make a connection in São Paulo (as opposed to some other major city nearby) as you'll have more chances to fill empty seats with people going/leaving there.

Maybe the government should step in and do some regulation, spreading companies' main hubs into various cities (to make it more like the US, with has company hubs in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta...). Another possibility would be to build off-city airports in major towns for the budget companies, like in Europe. More likely, however, they will just try to scale back the market by increasing prices so that the existing infrastructure handles it again.

In any case, the business of flying is changing radically in the world, and has been for quite a few years now. Budget companies, flying cheaper than ever, traditional companies in financial trouble (from the Brazilian Varig to TAP in Portugal to British Airways), delays and packed airports from São Paulo to Jakarta... it's an ongoing revolution where what used to be an elitist means of transportation is becoming available to anyone who could afford an interstate bus... but sometimes, like tonight, the 'growing pains' are hard to handle.