Plane crashes in Brazil's Sao Paulo state, killing all 61 aboard, airline says

VINHEDO: A passenger plane crashed into a gated residential community in Brazil's Sao Paulo state Friday, killing all 61 people aboard and leaving a smoldering wreck, officials and the airline said.

Officials did not say if anyone was killed on the ground in the neighbourhood where the plane landed in the city of Vinhedo, about 80 kilometres northwest of the metropolis of Sao Paulo. But witnesses at the scene said there were no victims among local residents.

The airline Voepass said that its plane, an ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop, was headed for Sao Paulo's international airport Guarulhos with 57 passengers and 4 crew members aboard when it crashed in Vinhedo. It provided a flight manifest with passenger names, but not their nationalities. A prior statement had said there were 58 passengers.

“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 prioritising provision of unrestricted assistance to the victims' families and effectively collaborating with authorities to determine the causes of the accident.”

It was the deadliest airline crash since January 2023, when 72 people died on board a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal that stalled and crashed while making its landing approach. That plane also was an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error.

At an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute of silence as he shared the news. Friday evening, he declared three days of mourning.

The state's firefighters, military police and civil defence authority dispatched teams to the location. Sao Paulo's public security secretary Guilherme Derrite spoke to reporters and confirmed that no survivors had been found. He also said the plane's black box was recovered.

“I thought it was going to fall in our yard,” a resident and witness who gave her name only as Ana Lucia de Lima 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.”

Parana state's Gov. Ratinho Júnior told journalists in Vinhedo that many of the passengers were doctors from his state attending a seminar.

“They were people who were used to saving lives, and now they lost theirs in such tragic circumstances,” Junior said, adding he had friends aboard. “It is a sad day.”

Video obtained from a witness by The Associated Press and verified shows at least two bodies strewn about flaming pieces of wreckage.

Brazilian television network GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area with smoke coming out of an obliterated plane fuselage. Additional footage on GloboNews earlier showed the plane plunging in a flat spin.

A report from television network Globo's meteorological centre said it “confirmed the possibility of the formation of ice in the region of Vinhedo,” and local media cited analysts pointing to icing as a potential cause for the crash.

But aviation expert Lito Sousa cautioned that meteorological conditions alone might not be enough to explain why the plane fell as it did.

“Analysing 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.”

And Marcelo Moura, director of operations for Voepass, told reporters Friday night that, while there were forecasts for ice, they were within acceptable levels for the aircraft.

Likewise, Lt. Col. Carlos Henrique Baldi, of the Brazilian air force's centre for the investigation and prevention of air accidents, told reporters in a late afternoon press conference that it was still too early to confirm whether ice caused the accident.

The plane is "certified in several countries to fly in severe icing conditions, including in countries unlike ours, where the impact of ice is more significant,” said Baldi, who heads the centre's investigation division.

In an earlier statement, the centre said that the plane's pilots didn't call for help nor say they were operating under adverse weather conditions.

In a separate statement, Brazil's Federal Police said it already had begun its investigation, and had dispatched specialists in plane crashes and the identification of disaster victims.

Authorities began transferring the corpses to the morgue on Friday, and called on victims' family members to bring any medical, X-ray and dental exams in order as a means to help identify the bodies.

French-Italian plane manufacturer ATR said in a statement that it had been informed that the accident involved its ATR 72-500 model, and said company specialists are “fully engaged to support both the investigation and the customer.”

The ATR 72 generally is used on shorter flights. The planes are built by a joint venture of Airbus in France and Italy's Leonardo S.p.A. Crashes involving various models of the ATR 72 have resulted in 470 deaths going back to the 1990s, according to a database of the Aviation Safety Network.

The Capela neighbourhood where the plane crashed Friday sits in a district far from the center of the prosperous city that's home to 77,000 residents. It had departed from Cascavel, in Parana state.