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 Families of the passengers killed in Brazil, last year, in the country's worst air disaster are using an American legal office specialized in air accidents to file a series of lawsuits. On July 17, 2007, 199 people died when TAM Airlines Flight 3054 slid off the runway at Congonhas Airport, in São Paulo and slammed into an air cargo building.
Aviation attorneys Steven C. Marks and Ricardo M. Martinez-Cid with the Podhurst Orseck law firm filed 59 wrongful death complaints related to the tragedy in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
In addition to TAM, which is charged with its own negligence and that of its pilots and maintenance personnel, the defendants in the lawsuits are Pegasus Aviation IV, Inc.; Airbus S.A.S.; Airbus Industrie G.I.E. (EADS) (EAD.PA); Airbus Customer Services, Inc.; Goodrich Corporation NYSE: GR; and International Aero Engines AG.
"Responsibility not only lies with the companies that manufactured and handled maintenance for the aircraft," said Marks, "We believe Airbus provided inadequate customer support, simulator services, and training materials for the pilots and flight crew that replicates the performance of the aircraft in all normal and abnormal conditions."
Marks said it's clear the flight crew knew there were problems with the aircraft before the disaster because the plane's right thrust reverser had been deactivated before the flight.
"The thrust reverser is used to slow the jet down upon landing. Without an operational right thrust reverser, it didn't have enough room to stop on the runway, ending in a horrific crash when the plane skidded off the runway's edge," he argue.
Podhurst Orseck filed the first lawsuit related to the crash on behalf of the family of 35-year-old Ricardo Tazoe of Miami, an employee with Banco Santander. In all of the cases, the plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial to recover financial damages for pain and suffering; lost value of life; funeral expenses; and all other damages they may be entitled to under the law.
This is not the first Brazilian air disaster handled by Marks and Martinez-Cid. They currently represent the families of several passengers who were killed when Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 collided with an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet over the Amazon Rainforest on September 29 2006. All 154 people aboard died in which was then called Brazil's worst plane accident.
The American attorneys have represented victims in other major commercial airline crashes, including those killed in the crash of Comair Flight 5191 at the Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Kentucky. in August 2006.
Marks has acted as co-lead trial counsel for the California State Court plaintiffs after a Silk Air crash between Jakarta and Singapore in 1997 and acted as lead liaison counsel for the state court and federal multi- district litigation plaintiffs' steering committees over the ValuJet Flight 592 crash in Miami-Dade County in 1996.
Based in Miami, Podhurst Orseck, P.A. concentrates exclusively in trial and appellate litigation. The firm's general tort practice places a major emphasis on aviation, automobile, products liability and medical malpractice litigation.
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The only good thing to say about the visit to Brazil of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday November 23, is that it was mercifully short and lasted less than 24 hours. Ahmadinejad had his picture taken being hugged by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva who gave him a warm welcome and said Iran had every right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. 
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
even going after the tire maker ???
whay not go after the air port and the goverment of brasil as they control all the points of the
airport there
the place should have been closed
why not sue the bulider who put the building where the plane could hit it