A radar failure forced Brazil to turn back some international flights and ground others just hours after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva reacted to the country's deadliest air disaster with vows to improve aviation safety, AP reported. Further shaking Brazilians' confidence, authorities announced that they had mistaken a piece of the fuselage from Tuesday's accident for the flight recorder and sent it to a laboratory for analysis. The unexplained radar outage over the Amazon, from around midnight until 2:30 a.m. local time, forced planes to return to their points of origin or make unscheduled landings at other airports. «This is total chaos here. I have never seen anything like and it makes me feel very unsafe,» said Eli Rocha, 52, of Oklahoma City, who was trying board a flight to Dallas Saturday at Sao Paulo's international airport, which was crowded with weary Americans arriving on long-delayed flights. A few hours earlier, Silva announced new safety measures and aviation investments _ including a new airport in Sao Paulo, where an Airbus A320 crashed on landing Tuesday, killing 191 people. All 187 people aboard and at least four on the ground died when the jetliner raced down the short, rain-slicked runway, skipped over a crowded highway and exploded in a fireball that was still smoldering four days later.
