Brazilian Plane Crash in São Paulo: 61 Lives Lost

At least 61 people are dead after a passenger plane crashed on the outskirts of São Paulo Friday afternoon, according to a statement issued by air company Voepass.

Dramatic footage circulating on social media showed the plane’s fall and its destroyed fuselage in flames on the ground.

Here’s what we know:

VINHEDO, Brazil – A passenger plane carrying 61 people crashed into a gated residential community in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo on Friday, killing all on board and leaving behind a smoldering wreckage, authorities and the airline said. told

Authorities did not immediately report any casualties on the ground at the crash site in the city of Vinhedo, about 50 miles northwest of Sao Paulo, but witnesses at the scene said that among the residents of the neighborhood. No one was affected.

Airline VOEPASS said the ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop was en route to Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport with 57 passengers and 4 crew members on board when it crashed in Vinhedo. An earlier statement said there were 58 passengers.

“The company regrets to inform you that all 61 people on board Flight 2283 died at the scene,” VOEPASS said in a statement. “At this time, VOEPASS is prioritizing the provision of unrestricted assistance to the families of the victims and cooperating effectively with the authorities to determine the causes of the accident.”

At a ceremony in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute of silence as he shared the news.

State fire fighters, military police and civil defense authority have dispatched teams to the spot. Sao Paulo Public Security Secretary Guilherme Deright spoke to reporters and confirmed that there were no survivors. He also said that the black box of the plane was found which was apparently intact.

I thought it was going to fall in our yard,” a resident and witness who gave her name only as Anna Lucia told reporters near the crash site. “It was scary, but thank God the locals I was not impressed. It seems that the 62 people on board were the real victims.

A companion and verified video by The Associated Press shows at least two bodies sprawled among the burning pieces of debris.

Brazilian television network Globo News showed aerial footage of an area showing smoke billowing from the fuselage of a crashed plane. Additional footage on GloboNews showed the plane drifting downward in a flat spin.

Flightradar24 said data sent from the plane showed it was diving between 8,000 and 24,000 feet per minute in the last 60 seconds of the flight.

The Brazilian air force’s air accident investigation and prevention center said in a statement that the pilots did not respond to calls from air traffic control in Sao Paulo, nor did they call for help or say they were in trouble. Working in weather conditions.

Authorities begin an investigation

In a separate statement, Brazil’s federal police said it had already begun its investigation, and was sending experts to help victims of plane crashes and disasters.

VOEPASS staff at Guarulhos airport told AP that the company is notifying the victims’ families and is helping them in a private room at the airport.

The plane’s manufacturer, French-Italian ATR, said in a statement that it had been informed that the crash involved an ATR 72-500, and that the company’s experts were “fully engaged in both the investigation and customer support.”

The ATR 72 is generally used for short flights. According to the Aviation Safety Network database, the planes were owned by France’s Airbus and Italy’s Leonardo S.p.A. have been built by a joint venture, with crashes of various ATR 72 models resulting in 470 deaths in the 1990s.

The January 2023 Yeti Airlines crash in Nepal that killed 72 people was an ATR 72-500. The cause was human error, the accidental positioning of both propellers in the winged position.

The neighborhood of Capella, where the plane crashed on Friday, sits in a district far from the affluent city center with 77,000 residents. It had departed from Cascaville in the old state.