Sao Paulo, Brazil ? Brazil’s deadliest jetliner crash was an accident foretold. For months, air safety concerns have been aired in congressional hearings, and pilots and traffic controllers have worried for years about the short, slippery runways at Brazil’s busiest airport.

Landing on the 6,362-foot-long runway at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport is so challenging that pilots liken it to an aircraft carrier – if they don’t touch down precisely within the tarmac’s first 1,000 feet, they’re warned to pull up and circle around again. The ungrooved runway becomes even more treacherous in the rain when it turns into a slick landing surface.

The runway appears to have been a key factor in Tuesday’s crash of TAM Flight 3054 from Porto Alegre, and critics condemned President Luis Inacio da Silva’s government Wednesday for failing to invest in safety measures since another deadly crash last year.

None of the 186 people on board survived, TAM Linhas Aereas SA chief executive Marco Antonio Bologna said Wednesday. Three TAM workers on the ground also died and another 11 were hospitalized.

The plane slammed into a gas station and a TAM Airlines building after narrowly clearing the airport’s perimeter fence and rush-hour traffic on a surrounding highway.

Brig. Jorge Kersul Filho, director of the Air Force’s Center for Investigation and Prevention of Air Accidents, said it appeared the pilot had tried to take off again before the crash.

“That he jumped over the avenue was an indication he tried to take off. If he didn’t (try to take off) he would have gone nose down at the end of the runway,” he said.

International air safety experts have long warned of the danger of just such an accident on the short runway at Sao Paulo’s airport, especially in heavy rain. Only the day before, two other planes skidded off the runway’s end.

Critics condemned Silva’s government for its failure to fix Brazil’s air traffic problems in the months since 154 people were killed in the September collision of a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 with a small jet over the Amazon rainforest.

“It’s been 10 months since the last worst air accident in Brazilian history and now we’ve had an accident worse than that,” said David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasilia. “If you look at what’s happened since September, the answer is nothing.”

“It was a tragedy foretold,” said political commentator Lucia Hippolito. “The government has done nothing because of administrative inefficiency and simple incompetence.”