Plane crashes in Brazil, killing all 61 people on board

A plane carrying 61 people crashed into a residential area in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo state, Brazil on Friday, leaving no survivors.

The device, from Voepass Aviation, fell vertically and spun on itself until it landed in vegetation near a residential area.

According to Brazilian authorities, no one survived among the 61 people on board, including 57 passengers and four crew members.

Initially, authorities said there were 62 passengers on the flight, but hours later the airline corrected this information, lowering the death toll to 61, as confirmed by Luiz Ricardo de Souza, director of the National Civil Aviation Authority (ANAC), at a press conference in Brasilia.

Colonel Cásio de Araujo de Freitas of the Sao Paulo Gendarmerie assured that there were no casualties on the ground because the plane went down in an “open area” within the Recanto Florida condominiums in the high-end urbanization.

The aircraft, a French-made twin-engine ATR-72-500, was covering a route between the city of Cascavel and Sao Paulo when it crashed shortly before 1:25 pm local time (16:25 GMT), 80 kilometres from its destination, Guarulhos Airport.

According to the professional website Flightradar, the plane was flying at an altitude of about 3,500 meters and crashed about a minute later. Several residents of Vinedo filmed the vertical fall from different angles, and these videos were widely circulated on social networks.

Several witnesses said they heard a roar before seeing the plane go down.

According to Flightradar, the aircraft made two more flights on Friday morning before the accident.

The fire caused by the accident has now been extinguished, although firefighters continued to work hours later to cool the fuselage.

The pilot did not report any emergency.

According to the person in charge of the accident investigation, the aircraft was flying normally and no emergency was reported.

“Everything is still premature. The only thing we have so far is that there was no communication between (the plane’s pilots) and the control bodies that indicated there would be an emergency,” said Brazilian Air Force Brigadier General Marcelo Moreno, director of the Center for Research and Prevention of Aviation Accidents (Cenipa). The official added that he hoped the plane’s black box, which has been rescued, could provide some clues about what happened.

Moreno said the flight was operating normally until 1:20 pm Brazil time (4:20 pm GMT), when the plane stopped responding to calls from Sao Paulo’s approach control centre and disappeared from radar a minute later.

The general said it was too early to comment on the different hypotheses pointed out by experts about the possible causes of the accident, the main of which is the possible formation of ice on the wings of the aircraft, which could explain the vertical fall of the aircraft and the rotation on its own.

Lula asks for a minute’s silence

Minutes after hearing the news, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expressed regret for the accident and called for a minute’s silence to mourn the victims.

The Brazilian president discovered the accident while preparing to give a speech at an event in Itajaí, Santa Catarina state, and interrupted the event to express regret.

“I have to deliver very bad news and I would like to ask everyone to stand and observe a minute of silence because a plane has just crashed in the city of Veneto, Sao Paulo, with 58 passengers and four crew members on board, and it seems that they are all dead,” Lula told attendees.

It was the worst air disaster in Brazil since 2007, when a TAM Airlines flight overran the runway at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport and crashed into a warehouse, killing 199 people.

In 2009, a flight on the Rio de Janeiro-Paris route crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in international waters, killing 216 people on board.