Dan1113 wrote:
They kept it off and so they were just as responsible, in my own opinion.
"Just as"? If you're going to consider the relative degrees of responsibility, doesn't that involve considering more things than just the mere fact that the transponder had gone off? Things like why the transponder went off? And what warnings they had that the transponder was off?

And then you have to balance that against what seems to have been total chaos at the time within Brazilian ATC. I'm not surprised that there is a disagreement about the relative balance between the different contributors to this accident.

Long-haul flying - how to sleep your way around the world.