All those on board were killed when a passenger plane carrying 62 people crashed on Friday afternoon outside of São Paulo, Brazil.
Social media users shared dramatic video of the jet falling and its wrecked fuselage catching fire. Voepass, a regional airline, increased the number of fatalities from 61 to 62 after determining that there was an additional passenger aboard. Four crew members and 57 passengers were listed as being on board earlier.All of the passengers had Brazilian documents, airline officials said. Portugal’s foreign ministry said on Saturday that one Portuguese citizen traveling on the plane died in the crash. It is unclear if that passenger or any other victims had dual citizenship.
Flight tracking data shows that the ATR 72-500, a twin-engine turboprop plane, dropped 17,000 feet in just one minute, but it is not yet clear why. Social media videos of the crash showed the plane spiraling out of the sky before hitting the ground as people in the neighborhood shouted in fear. Another video showed the wreckage of the plane in flames on the ground. No one on the ground was hurt, city officials told CNN. The flight left Cascavel, in the Brazilian state of Parana, and was en route to Guarulhos, in São Paulo state, when it lost signal shortly before 1:30 p.m. (12:30 p.m. ET), according to Flightradar24 data.
It began losing altitude a minute and a half before crashing. The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m., when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds. Eight seconds later, it lost just under 2,000 feet. Then, in approximately one minute, it began rapidly descending – losing roughly 17,000 feet in just one minute. The last data transmission from the plane was at 1:22 p.m.
Luiz Augusto De Oliveira described the moment the plane struck part of his property. “The plane crashed at my house,” he told Reuters. “There were three people in the house – me, my wife and the maid – we are all fine.” He continued, “We thought it was a helicopter in breakdown due to the noise … and suddenly we saw the aircraft exploding in the garage of my house.”There is no information yet on what caused the crash, Voepass CEO Eduardo Busch told a press conference. “The entire crew was competent,” Busch said. “We are waiting for access to all communications between the pilot and the control tower to have a broader understanding of what happened.”
Busch said the plane had two black boxes – devices that store flight data which are built to withstand crashes – and that there are two highly qualified laboratories available to analyze them.nAuthorities have so far retrieved 24 bodies from the crash site, Vinhedo mayor Darío Pacheco told a press conference on Saturday. Of those, two victims – the pilot and the co-pilot – have been preliminarily identified based on visual recognition, he said, who added that the aircraft’s black boxes had been recovered in working order and sent to Brasilia for analysis. Earlier, Sao Paulo fire brigade spokesperson Maycon Cristo said all the victims were still seated during the crash and no bodies were ejected from the site due to the plane crashing flat onto ground, Cristo said.
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