FLYING at 37,000 feet through clear blue skies, enjoying the luxury of a new corporate jet above the endless green of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest should have been a dream assignment for the writer from Business Jet Traveller magazine.

But it suddenly became a nightmare after the plane was struck by a Boeing 737, clipping a wing and spinning the aircraft out of control.

As the pilots began a desperate struggle to bring the plane under control, Joe Sharkey and his fellow passengers prepared to die. Miraculously, he and the six others on board the Embraer Legacy 600 jet survived. The 155 passengers and crew on board a Boeing 737 operated by the Brazilian carrier Gol did not. Its wreckage was later found swallowed up by the jungle.

Yesterday Sharkey, a New York Times journalist who was on a freelance assignment for the aviation magazine, told of his extraordinary brush with death, and of the heartache after learning the fate of the passengers on the Boeing 737.

Writing in his newspaper, Sharkey described the moment his flight went horribly wrong: “Without warning, I felt a terrific jolt and heard a loud bang, followed by an eerie silence, save for the hum of the engines. I lifted the shade. The sky was clear; the sun low in the sky. The rainforest went on for ever. But there, at the end of the wing, was a jagged ridge, perhaps a foot high, where the five-foot-tall winglet was supposed to be.”

As he stared out of the window it became clear that the situation was worsening. Rivets started to come loose and the edge of the wing began to peel back. The plane started to lose speed.

The pilots, whose calm in the crisis was praised by Sharkey, scanned maps and searched for a landing place in what is one of the world’s most isolated regions. “By now we all knew how bad this was. I wondered how badly ‘ditching’ — an optimistic term for crashing — was going to hurt. I thought of my family. And as our hopes sank with the sun, some of us jotted notes to spouses and loved ones and placed them in our wallets, hoping the notes would later be found.”

Then the pilots spotted a Brazilian air force base hidden in the jungle and managed to make an emergency landing. Several hours after their own near-brush with death, jokes about the close call turned to tears as Sharkey and his fellow travellers were told of the Boeing’s fatal crash.

Mid-air collisions are extremely rare. Both planes were equipped with anti-collision devices and should have been flying at different altitudes.

Investigators believe that human error, by the Legacy jet’s pilots as well as air traffic controllers, resulted in the Legacy flying towards the jungle city of Manaus at 37,000 ft rather than 36,000.

That is the altitude reserved for planes from Manaus to Brasília — the Boeing’s origin and destination.

When air traffic control realised the problem it could not contact the Legacy, which was in an area over the rainforest where controllers cannot contact planes by radio.

Investigators are trying to determine why the corporate jet survived while the more powerful Boeing 737 crashed.

One theory is that the Gol pilot may have swerved at the last minute to avoid the Legacy, sending his plane into a deadly dive.

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