The airline VOEPASS said that its plane had 57 passengers and 4 crew members aboard when it crashed.
A plane that was carrying 61 people crashed near Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Friday, killing everyone on board, the airline said.
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 prioritizing provision of unrestricted assistance to the victims’ families and effectively collaborating with authorities to determine the causes of the accident.”
Firefighters, military police, and the the country’s civil defense authority dispatched crews to the crash site in Vinhedo, the government said in a
statement on its website.
Video footage uploaded
online showed a plane spiraling downward. After the plane disappears behind the trees, a large explosion can be heard and black smoke can be seen, according to the footage.
At an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute of silence as he shared the news.
The City of Vinhedo, where the plane crashed,
told Globo that everyone on board the plane died in the accident. Osmir Cruz, an official with the Vinhedo government, said the aircraft crashed near a residence, but no injuries were reported on the ground.
Data from Flightradar24
shows that the plane, an ATR-72-500 turboprop passenger jet, was operated by the Voepass airline, which also said in a statement to local media that 62 people were on board. It left Cascavel and was traveling to Sao Paulo when it lost its signal at around 1:30 p.m. local time.
Local officials told Brazilian media that the plane went down in a residential area where the plane crashed, while Brazilian channel Globo showed aerial footage of an area that was on fire along with a destroyed plane fuselage.
Transponder data shows the plane was dropping at a speed of between 8 and 24 feet per minute during the final 60 seconds of the flight, FlightRadar24
said. In the area where the plane crashed, there was an active warning for icing between 12,000 and 21,000 feet elevation, according to the website, and the plane was flying at 17,000 feet when it started going down.
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 to help.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
