VINHEDO, Brazil (AP) — A passenger plane crashed into a gated residential community in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state Friday, killing all 61 people on board and leaving behind a smoky wreckage, officials and the airline said.
Officials did not say whether anyone was killed on the ground in the neighborhood where the plane landed in the city of Vinhedo, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of the city of Sao Paulo. However, people present at the scene said that there were no victims among the locals.
Airline Voepass said its plane, an ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop, was en route to Sao Paulo’s international airport, Guarulhos, with 57 passengers and four crew members on board. It provided a flight report containing the names of the passengers, but not their nationalities. Earlier reports said there were 58 passengers.
“The company regrets to report that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died on the spot,” Voepass said in a statement. “At this time, Voepass prioritizes providing unrestricted assistance to the families of the victims and effectively cooperating with the authorities to determine the causes of the accident.”
It is the worst air crash since January 2023, when 72 people died when an Eti Airways flight stalled on landing in Nepal. That flight was also an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error.
At an event 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. Sao Paulo state governor Darcisio de Freidas declared three days of mourning.
The state’s fire brigade, military police and Civil Defense Commission teams were dispatched to the spot. Sao Paulo’s Secretary of Public Security Guilherme Territ spoke to reporters and confirmed that no survivors had been found. He also said that the black box of the plane was recovered.
“I thought it was going to fall in our yard,” a resident and witness, who gave her name as Ana Lucia, told reporters near the crash site. “It was scary, but thank God there were no casualties among the locals. It seems that all 62 people on board were indeed killed.
Video obtained and verified by The Associated Press from a witness showed at least two bodies strewn with pieces of burning wreckage.
Brazilian television network GloboNews showed aerial footage of the area where smoke was billowing from the fuselage of the destroyed plane. Additional footage earlier on GloboNews showed the plane moving downward in a flat spin.
Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 reported that data transmitted from the plane indicated the plane was diving between 8,000 and 24,000 feet per minute in the last 60 seconds of the flight.
A report from television network Globo’s weather station said it had “confirmed the possibility of ice forming in the Vinhedo area,” and local media cited analysts who pointed to icing as a possible cause of the crash.
But aviation expert Mila Lilo Sosa warned that weather conditions alone would not be enough to explain why the plane went down.
“Analyzing a plane crash with just pictures can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes,” Sousa told the AP by phone. “But we can see a plane that has no horizontal velocity and is out of support. In this flat spin condition, there is no way to regain control of the aircraft.
The Brazilian Air Force’s Center for the Investigation and Prevention of Air Accidents said in a statement that the pilots did not respond to calls from air traffic control in Sao Paulo, call for help or say they were operating under adverse weather conditions.
In a separate statement, Brazil’s federal police said it had already begun its investigation and had dispatched experts to identify plane crash and disaster victims.
Officials began transferring the bodies to the morgue on Friday and invited family members of the victims to bring any medical, X-ray and dental tests to help identify the bodies.
Franco-Italian aircraft manufacturer ATR said in a statement that the crash involved its ATR 72-500 model, and that company experts were “fully engaged in both the investigation and supporting the customer”.
ATR 72 is generally used on short flights. According to the Aviation Safety Network’s database, the planes were developed by a joint venture between France’s Airbus and 470 people died in the Leonardo Spa, Italy crashes involving various models of the ATR72.
The Capela neighborhood where Friday’s plane crashed sits in a district far from the center of the prosperous city of 77,000 residents. It originates from Kaskeval in Parana state.
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Sá Pessoa reported from Guarulhos. AP video journalist Tatiana Pollastri contributed from Vinhedo. AP writer David Koenig contributed from Dallas.
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