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VINETO, Brazil (AP) — A plane carrying 62 people crashed into a residential area in a city in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state on Friday and burst into flames, according to the airline, but it was not immediately clear how many people were injured or killed.
VOEPASS Airlines confirmed in a statement that a plane bound for Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport with 58 passengers and four crew members on board crashed inside a gated community in Vinhedo. The statement did not specify the cause of the accident.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made the announcement as he asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute’s silence at an event in southern Brazil. He said it appeared all the passengers and crew on board had died, but did not elaborate on how he had obtained that information.
Firefighters, military police and civil protection teams were dispatched to the crash site in Vinhedo. Authorities blocked the entrance to the residential area where the plane went down, and reporters outside watched as official vehicles, including an ambulance, moved in and waited for updates.
“I thought the plane was going to fall into our yard,” a resident and witness who gave her name only as Ana Lucia told reporters near the crash site. “It was scary, but thank God there were no casualties among the locals. However, it seems the 62 people inside the plane were the real victims.”
Video obtained by The Associated Press from bystanders and verified showed at least two bodies scattered among the burning wreckage of the plane.
Brazilian television network GloboNews broadcast an aerial video showing the plane’s fuselage destroyed and thick smoke billowing. Additional footage released earlier by GloboNews showed the plane plummeting and spiraling.
Brazil’s air force’s air crash investigation and prevention center said in a statement it had sent a team to the crash site, while Brazil’s federal police said in a separate statement it had opened an investigation and sent experts in air crash and disaster victim identification to assist.
A VOEPASS worker at Guarulhos Airport told The Associated Press the company was notifying the victims’ families and providing them with support in a private room at the airport, but did not specify the number of victims.
The plane was an ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24, but VOEPASS did not immediately confirm that.
The plane’s manufacturer, French-Italian ATR, said in a statement it had been informed of the accident involving that model of aircraft and that company experts were “fully committed to the investigation and supporting customers.”
The ATR 72 is typically used for short-haul flights. The aircraft is manufactured by a joint venture between France’s Airbus and Italy’s Leonardo SpA. According to the Aviation Safety Network database, crashes of various ATR 72 models have killed 470 people since the 1990s.
The Capella neighborhood where the plane crashed is far from the bustling city center and has 77,000 residents.
The plane took off from Cascavel in Paraná state.
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