VINHEDO, Brazil—All 61 persons on board were killed when a passenger jet crashed into a gated residential subdivision in the state of Sao Paulo on Friday, leaving a smoking wreck, according to authorities and the airline.
In the neighborhood where the jet landed in Vinhedo, a city located around 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of Sao Paulo, officials did not disclose if any people had died on the ground. However, local people were not among the casualties, according to witnesses at the site.
The airline Voepass reported that when the ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop crashed in Vinhedo, it was carrying 57 passengers and 4 crew members and was en route to Guarulhos, the international airport in Sao Paulo. The flight manifest it gave included the names of the passengers on it, but not their countries. There were 58 passengers, according to an earlier announcement.
“The company regrets to inform that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died at the site,” Voepass said in a statement. “At this time, Voepass is prioritizing provision of unrestricted assistance to the victims’ families and effectively collaborating with authorities to determine the causes of the accident.”
It was the worst airline disaster since January 2023, when a Yeti Airlines aircraft in Nepal stalled and crashed during the landing approach, killing 72 passengers. The final assessment attributed the plane's cause to pilot error, and it was likewise an ATR 72.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva broke the news during an event in southern Brazil, asking the audience to rise and observe a minute of silence. He announced three days of mourning on Friday night.
Teams from the state's civil defense authorities, military police, and firemen were sent to the scene. Speaking with reporters, Guilherme Derrite, the public security secretary for Sao Paulo, affirmed that no survivors had been located. He said that the black box of the aircraft had been found.
“I thought it was going to fall in our yard,” a 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 victims among the locals. It seems that the 62 people inside the plane were the real victims, though.”
The governor of Parana state, Ratinho Júnior, told reporters in Vinhedo that many of the travelers were medical professionals from his state who were there for a conference.
“They were people who were used to saving lives, and now they lost theirs in such tragic circumstances,” Júnior said, adding he had friends aboard. “It is a sad day.”
At least two victims are seen scattered around smoldering debris in footage that The Associated Press was able to confirm and receive from a witness.
GloboNews, a Brazilian media network, aired overhead images of a region where smoke was emerging from the fuselage of an entirely destroyed jet. Additional video that was previously posted on GloboNews shows the aircraft diving into a flat spin.
The weather center of television network Globo "confirmed the possibility of the formation of ice in the region of Vinhedo," according to a report, and local media quoted experts who said that icing may have contributed to the accident.
However, aviation expert Mila Lilo Sousa issued a warning, saying that the plane's fall may have been caused by more than just meteorological factors.
“Analyzing an air crash just with images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes,” Sousa told the AP by phone. “But we can see a plane with loss of support, no horizontal speed. In this flat spin condition, there’s no way to reclaim control of the plane.”
Additionally, Marcelo Moura, Voepass's head of operations, said reporters on Friday night that although there were ice forecasts, the amounts were manageable for airplanes.
Similarly, in a late-afternoon news briefing, Lt. Col. Carlos Henrique Baldi of the Brazilian aviation Force's center for the investigation and prevention of aviation accidents stated that it was still too early to determine if ice was the cause of the incident.
According to Baldi, who oversees the center's investigative branch, the aircraft is "certified in several countries to fly in severe icing conditions, including in countries unlike ours, where the impact of ice is more significant."
The center claimed in a previous statement that the pilots of the aircraft did not report that they were flying in bad weather or ask for assistance.
Brazil's Federal Police stated in a second statement that it had already started its investigation and had sent out experts in aviation disasters and victim identification.
In order to aid in the identification of the dead, authorities asked the relatives of the victims to bring any recent medical, X-ray, and dental records on Friday when they started moving the bodies to the morgue.
The ATR 72-500 type was involved in the accident, the French-Italian aircraft manufacturer said in a statement, adding that company specialists are "fully engaged to support both the investigation and the customer."
Shorter trips are often operated by the ATR 72. The aircraft are produced by a joint venture between Airbus, based in France, and Leonardo S.p.A., based in Italy. Since the 1990s, crashes involving different ATR 72 variants have claimed 470 lives, according to a database maintained by the Aviation Safety Network.
The 77,000-person wealthy city's wealthy core is distant from the Capela area, the scene of the jet accident on Friday. It had left the state of Parana's Cascavel.
