Passenger plane crashes in fiery wreck in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state
By Gabriel Araujo
A plane with 61 people aboard crashed in a fiery wreck in a residential area of a city in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state on Friday, killing everyone on board.
The airline Voepass initially said that a plane headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport, Guarulhos, had crashed in the city of Vinhedo with 58 passengers and four crew members aboard. A later statement confirmed that 61 people were onboard, not 62. The statement didn’t say what caused the accident.
Fire coming from a plane that crashed by a home in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo state.Credit: AP
Video shared on social media showed the ATR-72 aircraft spinning out of control as it plunged down behind a cluster of trees near houses, followed by a large plume of black smoke.
Nearby resident Daniel de Lima said he heard a loud noise, looked outside his condominium in Vinhedo, and saw the plane in a horizontal spiral.
“It was rotating, but it wasn’t moving forward,” he told Reuters. “Soon after, it fell out of the sky and exploded.”
Rescue crews arrive at the crash site in Vinhedo, Brazil.Credit: Getty Images
City officials at Valinhos, near Vinhedo, said there were no survivors and only one home in the local condominium complex had been damaged while none of the residents were hurt.
“I almost believe the pilot tried to avoid a nearby neighbourhood, which is densely populated,” de Lima said.
The plane’s unusual final circling motion before hitting the ground triggered widespread curiosity among aviation experts, especially given the lack of obvious bad weather. However, by the end of the day, investigators said it was too early to determine the cause.
“Today ice was predicted (at the altitudes the plane was flying at), but within the acceptable range,” Voepass chief operations officer Marcel Moura told a press conference.
This frame grab from video provided by Felipe Magalhaes Filho showed the aircraft’s wreckage in Vinhedo.Credit: AP
“But the plane is sensitive to ice, that could be a starting point,” Moura said, adding the plane’s de-icing system, along with the rest, had been deemed operational before takeoff.
The head of the Brazilian aviation accident investigation centre, Cenipa, said that the plane’s so-called “black box” containing voice recordings and flight data had been recovered from the site.
US aviation safety expert Anthony Brickhouse said investigators would examine factors like weather and whether the engines and controls were functioning properly as they examine causes of loss of control in flight.
“From what I’ve seen, it was definitely what we would call loss of control,” he said.
Flight radar data showed significant gyrations in speed before the crash, US aviation safety consultant and former commercial pilot John Cox said, cautioning that he would want to verify the data but that something “really significant” happened to cause the plane to spin when it came down.
“It appears that there may have been some catastrophic event before that loss of control,” he said.
No emergency call
Cenipa head Marcelo Moreno told a press conference that initial reports indicated the aircraft had not reached out to traffic control to report an emergency.
Voepass, Brazil’s fourth-largest airline by market share, had originally reported 62 people aboard the aircraft. Local outlet Globo News interviewed two men who said they had missed the flight.
The plane had 57 passengers and four crew on board, Voepass said. The carrier reported that all were carrying Brazilian-issued documents.
Some of the passengers were doctors from Paraná heading to a seminar, Governor Ratinho Junior told journalists.
“These were people who were used to saving lives, and now they’ve lost theirs in such tragic circumstances,” he said.
Franco-Italian ATR, jointly owned by Airbus and Leonardo, is the dominant producer of regional turboprop planes that can seat 40 to 70 people.
ATR told Reuters that its specialists were “fully engaged” with the investigation into the crash and its customers.
The crash is Brazil’s deadliest since 199 people were killed in 2007 on a flight operated by TAM, which later joined LAN to become what is now LATAM Airlines.
Reuters, AP
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