Plane crashes in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state, killing all 61 aboard

A passenger plane has crashed into a gated residential community in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state, killing all 61 people aboard and leaving a smouldering wreck, officials and the airline said.

Officials gave no immediate word on any casualties on the ground at the site of the crash in the city of Vinhedo, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) north west of Sao Paulo, but witnesses at the scene said there were no victims among residents of the neighbourhood.

The airline Voepass said the ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop was heading to Sao Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos with 57 passengers and four crew members aboard when it crashed in Vinhedo.

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.”

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.

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 were found.

He also said the plane’s black box was found, apparently intact.

“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.”

Video obtained by The Associated Press (AP) from a bystander 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 drifting downward in a flat spin.

Flightradar24 said data sent from the plane indicated it was diving at 8,000 to 24,000ft per minute in the last 60 seconds of the flight.

The Brazilian air force’s centre for the investigation and prevention of air accidents said in a statement that pilots did not respond to calls from air traffic control in Sao Paulo, nor did they call for help or say they were operating under adverse weather conditions.

In a separate statement, Brazil’s Federal Police said it had already begun its investigation, and is dispatching specialists in plane crashes and the identification of disaster victims to help.

Voepass staff at the Guarulhos airport told the AP that the company is notifying victims’ family members and supporting them at a private room in the airport.

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

The ATR 72 is generally 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 Yeti Airlines crash that killed 72 in Nepal in January 2023 was an ATR 72-500.

The cause was human error, an accidental positioning of both propellers in the feathered position.

The Capela neighbourhood where the plane crashed on Friday sits in a district far from the centre of the prosperous city that is home to 77,000 residents.

It had departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.