Plane with 62 people on board crashes in burning wreckage in Brazil

MGN

A plane carrying 62 people crashed in flames in a residential area of ​​a city in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo on Friday, the airline said. It was not immediately clear how many people were injured or killed, but the country’s president said everyone on board was presumed dead.

The airline VOEPASS confirmed in a statement that a plane en route to Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo with 58 passengers and four crew members on board crashed in a residential complex in the city of Vinhedo. The statement did not provide any details on the cause of the accident.

At an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute’s silence as he announced the news. He said it appeared that all passengers and crew on board had died, without elaborating on how he had obtained the information.

“Very sad,” he wrote on social media. “My solidarity goes out to the families and friends of the victims.”

Firefighters, military police and the civil protection agency have sent teams to the crash site in Vinhedo, the government said in a statement.

Authorities cordoned off access to the residential area where the plane crashed while journalists stood outside watching official vehicles, including ambulances, arrive and waited for news.

“I thought it was going to fall in our garden,” a local 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 that the 62 people on the plane were the real victims.”

A video obtained and verified by the Associated Press from a passerby shows at least two bodies scattered among burning wreckage.

Brazilian television station GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area where smoke was rising from the destroyed fuselage. Additional footage from GloboNews earlier showed the plane drifting vertically downwards and spiraling as it fell.

The Brazilian Air Force’s Aviation Accident Investigation and Prevention Center said in a statement that a team was on its way to the crash site. In a separate statement, Brazil’s Federal Police said it had already begun its investigation and was sending specialists in air crashes and disaster victim identification to help.

VOEPASS employees at Guarulhos airport told AP that the company was notifying the victims’ families and assisting them in a private room at the airport, but did not specify how many victims there were.

According to flight tracking website FlightRadar24, the aircraft is a twin-engine turboprop ATR 72-500, but VOEPASS did not immediately confirm this.

FlightRadar24 said in a social media post that there was an “active severe icing warning” in the area where the plane crashed, between 12,000 and 21,000 feet. FlightRadar24 said the plane was flying at an altitude of 17,000 feet shortly before the crash.

The aircraft’s manufacturer, the French-Italian ATR, said in a statement that it had been informed that this aircraft model was involved in the accident. The company’s specialists were “fully committed to supporting both the investigation and the customer.”

The ATR 72 is generally used for shorter flights. The aircraft are built by a joint venture between Airbus in France and Leonardo SpA in Italy. Since the 1990s, crashes involving various models of the ATR 72 have claimed 470 lives, according to a database maintained by the Aviation Safety Network.

The Capela district, where the plane crashed, is far from the center of the wealthy city of 77,000 inhabitants.

The plane took off from Cascavel in the state of Paraná.

The crash occurred less than a year after a plane crash in the Brazilian Amazon killed 12 people, including a baby.

Nathalie Cicari, who lives near the crash site, told CNN Brasil that the impact was “terrifying.”

“I was eating lunch when I heard a very loud noise very close by,” she said, describing the sound as booming but “much louder.”

“I went out onto the balcony and saw the plane spinning. Within seconds I realized this was not a normal movement for an airplane,” she told the broadcaster.

Cicari was not injured but had to evacuate her house, which was filled with black smoke from the crash.

Teams of firefighters, military police and state civil protection were deployed in the Capela district of Vinhedo.

According to the website planespotters.net, the ill-fated aircraft made its first flight in April 2010.