Plane crashes in Brazil airline claims that all 61 people on board died in Sao Paulo state.
Brazil Plane Crash
According to authorities and the airline, a passenger plane crashed into a gated residential subdivision in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Friday, killing all 61 people on board and leaving a smoldering ruin.
In the neighborhood where the plane landed in Vinhedo, a city located roughly 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Sao Paulo, officials did not disclose if any people had died on the ground. However, local people were not among the victims, according to witnesses at the scene.
The airline Voepass reported that when the ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop crashed in Vinhedo, it was carrying 57 passengers and 4 crew members and was en route to Guarulhos, the international airport in Sao Paulo. The flight manifest it gave included the names of the passengers on it, but not their countries. There were 58 passengers, according to an earlier announcement.
Voepass released a statement saying, “The company regrets to inform that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died at the site.” “At this moment, Voepass is putting the needs of the families of the victims first and working with the authorities to find out what caused the accident.”
It was the worst airline disaster since January 2023, when a Yeti Airlines aircraft in Nepal stalled and crashed during the landing approach, killing 72 people. The final assessment attributed the plane’s cause to pilot error, and it was likewise an ATR 72.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva broke the news during an event in southern Brazil, asking the audience to stand and observe a minute of silence. He announced three days of mourning on Friday night.
Teams from the state’s civil defense authorities, military police, and firefighters were sent to the scene. Speaking with reporters, Guilherme Derrite, the public security secretary for Sao Paulo, affirmed that no survivors had been located. He added that the black box of the aircraft had been found.
Near the accident scene, a neighbor and witness identified only as Ana Lucia de Lima told reporters, “I thought it was going to fall in our yard.” “Thank God there were no victims among the locals, even though it was frightening.” However, it appears that the 62 occupants of the aircraft were the actual casualties.
“They were individuals who were accustomed to sparing lives, and now they perished in such horrible ways,” Júnior remarked, mentioning that he had companions on board. “This is a depressing day.”
At least two victims are seen scattered around smoldering wreckage in footage that The Associated Press was able to confirm and receive from a witness.
GloboNews, a Brazilian media network, aired aerial images of a region where smoke was emerging from the fuselage of an entirely destroyed jet. Extra video that was previously posted on GloboNews shows the aircraft diving into a flat spin.
The weather center of television network Globo “confirmed the possibility of the formation of ice in the region of Vinhedo,” according to a report, and local media quoted experts who said that icing may have contributed to the crash.
However, aviation expert Lito Sousa issued a warning, saying that the plane’s fall may have been caused by more than just meteorological factors.
Sousa told the AP over the phone that “analyzing an air crash just with images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes.” However, we can make out a plane that is losing horizontal speed and support. There’s no turning back the plane in this flat spin situation.
Additionally, Marcelo Moura, Voepass’s head of operations, informed reporters on Friday night that although there were ice forecasts, the amounts were manageable for airplanes.
Similarly, in a late-afternoon press briefing, Lt. Col. Carlos Henrique Baldi of the Brazilian Air Force’s center for the investigation and prevention of air accidents stated that it was still too early to determine if ice was the cause of the incident.
According to Baldi, who oversees the center’s investigation branch, the aircraft is “certified in several countries to fly in severe icing conditions, including in countries unlike ours, where the impact of ice is more significant.”
The center claimed in a previous statement that the pilots of the aircraft did not report that they were flying in bad weather or ask for assistance.
Brazil’s Federal Police stated in a second statement that it had already started its investigation and had sent out experts in aviation crashes and victim identification.
In order to aid in the identification of the dead, authorities asked the relatives of the victims to bring any recent medical, X-ray, and dental records on Friday when they started moving the bodies to the morgue.
