David Rimmer was flying over the jungle from Manaus in Brazil on a business trip in 2006 when the private jet he was on flew into a Boeing 737 800 in a collision unlike anything in aviation history.
Rimmer, 64, told DailyMail.com that his jet, with seven people on board, was cruising at 37,000 feet when he heard what he describes as a ‘very sudden jolt’.
‘There was no warning,’ he said, ‘We really had no idea what it was, but it was more severe than a typical bump in the clouds. But we couldn’t see anything.’
Airplanes have technology designed to warn of impending collisions, but it did not work that day: Rimmer and the jet’s two pilots only knew that something serious had happened when they saw the ‘winglet’ on their jet’s tip had been damaged.
The plane’s cockpit voice recorder was found in the jungle (Brazilian Air Force)
Brazilian Air Force inspect the wreckage of the Boeing 737 800 (Brazilian Air Force)
Rimmer has been married 34 years. He and his wife have two daughters who were ages 10 and 12 at the time of the incident.
‘It was hard not to keep thinking about how badly it might end and hit would affect my family, but I tried as hard as I could not to focus on the possibility,’ he said.
‘It would have made it more terrifying.’
Rimmer recalled it being ‘pretty quiet and reserved in the back of the cabin.
‘We had no means of communicating with the ground – no phones and the WiFi hadn’t been activated,’ he explained.
‘One of the passengers, Joe Sharkey from The New York Times, wrote a goodbye note to his wife but he didn’t tell us about it until we landed safely.
‘I wish I had the presence of mind to write to my wife and daughters, but I did not.’
The 86-foot Embraer Legacy 600 business jet was flying from where it had been manufactured to the US, Rimmer explained.
Rimmer said, ‘We looked out at the left hand side of the airplane and the winglet, instead of this smooth piece of metal, it was this jagged edge. It had clearly been sheared off by something. But we, we really had no idea what it was.’
The closure rate (effectively the combined speeds) of the two aircraft was 1,000 miles per hour, Rimmer learned after the 2006 collision, which meant it was impossible that they would have seen anything.
Rimmer said, ‘Our crew took control of the airplane, and it was seriously compromised.’
One of Rimmer’s colleagues looked back and saw that an ‘almost surgical’ sliver of the tail had been sheared off as well.
He said: ‘There was nothing I could do except ride it out and keep my wits about me. It would have been really easy to descend into this overwhelming fear, but it wouldn’t have done any good.
‘It just would have made the next period of time that much more terrifying. It was pretty solemn in the cabin.
‘It was very quiet. We just knew that we were in serious trouble and were hoping for the best. And about 35 minutes later, we landed at this remote military base in the Amazon.’
It was a calm and peaceful day when David Rimmer’s business jet flew head-on into a Boeing 737 800
It was only when the crew was sitting down to pizza for dinner that the only Portuguese speaker among the crew made a horrifying discovery.
Rimmer said, ‘He came back to our table and said, ‘Guys, I have terrible news to share with you. Along our flight path, there’s an airliner that’s missing, and they don’t know what happened to it, but it’s too much of a coincidence.’
The crew shifted from a sense of relief to a terrible sadness, Rimmer said.
They also realized how small their chances of surviving such a collision had been.
Rimmer said: ‘The chances of anybody surviving that kind of accident are minimal. I don’t believe it’s ever happened before.
‘If the airliner were a couple of inches lower than it would have taken off our wing. If it were a couple of inches closer to us, it would have taken off our tail, and neither would be survivable. It’s just impossible to fathom how close a call it was.’
The collision between the Boeing and Rimmer’s jet sliced off the wing of the larger aircraft.
An Embraer Legacy 600 similar to the one in the crash (stock image)
The Boeing 737 crashed into the jungle, and all 154 passengers and crew died.
The investigation into the crash became highly politicized in Brazil, with blame aimed at the pilots of the smaller aircraft at certain points.
But Rimmer said that despite differing conclusions from the Brazilian investigation and the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) he believes the fault lies ‘fundamentally’ with air traffic control’s failures to keep the two planes separated.
He said: ‘Our pilots don’t have a view of the sky. Only air traffic controllers do.’
Rimmer has since campaigned for improved aviation safety, and still works in aviation as CEO of AB Aviation.
He said that the accident fundamentally changed his views on life.
He said: ‘The initial challenge was to figure out why us? Why were we spared? 154 people were not. There’s no answer to that question.’
‘The next question is, what do I do with this gift? It’s not a total celebration, because our survival was tied to such tragedy. There’s gratitude, but you never want to lose sight of the loss.’
It was a calm and peaceful day when David Rimmer’s business jet flew head-on into a Boeing 737 800
Rimmer said that he still thinks about the accident daily, and that every day now feels like a ‘gift’ – saying that he now tries to be more charitable, more giving, and to focus on family and be a better father.
He gives to causes outside of aviation, and also campaigns for improved safety.
He says, I feel it’s my duty to try to raise awareness of safety issues in the aviation community. I use the lessons learned of being part of such a major accident in the hopes that it will help save other lives.
He says, ‘All of us on the airplane observe two birthdays. One is our chronological birthday, and the other is the day that we were spared.’