VINHEDO, Brazil (AP) — A passenger plane carrying 61 people crashed into a gated community in the Brazilian state of São Paulo on Friday, killing all aboard, the airline said.
The airline had previously reported that 62 people were on board the flight that crashed in Vinhedo, about 80 kilometers northwest of Sao Paulo, but later updated the number to 61.
“The company regrets to announce that all 61 people on board Flight 2283 perished at the scene,” VOEPASS said in a statement. “At this time, VOEPASS is committed to providing full assistance to the families of the victims and is working effectively with the authorities to determine the causes of the accident.”
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS. The previous AP story follows below.
VINHEDO, Brazil (AP) — A plane carrying 62 people crashed in flames Friday in a residential area of a city in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. The airline said it was initially unclear how many people were injured or killed.
The airline VOEPASS confirmed in a statement that a plane en route to Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo with 58 passengers and four crew members on board crashed in a residential complex in the city of Vinhedo. The statement did not provide any details on the cause of the accident.
At an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute’s silence as he announced the news. He said it appeared that all passengers and crew on board had died, without elaborating on how he had obtained the information.
Firefighters, military police and the Civil Protection Agency dispatched teams to the crash site in Vinhedo. Authorities sealed off access to the residential area where the plane crashed while journalists watched outside as official vehicles, including ambulances, entered and waited for news.
“I thought it was going to fall in our garden,” a local 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 casualties among the locals. However, it seems that the 62 people on the plane were the real victims.”
A video obtained and verified by the Associated Press from a passerby shows at least two bodies scattered among burning wreckage.
Brazilian television station GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area where smoke was rising from the destroyed fuselage. Additional footage from GloboNews earlier showed the plane drifting vertically downwards and spiraling as it fell.
The Brazilian Air Force’s Aviation Accident Investigation and Prevention Center said in a statement that a team was on its way to the crash site. In a separate statement, Brazil’s Federal Police said it had already begun its investigation and was sending specialists in air crashes and disaster victim identification to help.
VOEPASS employees at Guarulhos airport told AP that the company was notifying the victims’ families and assisting them in a private room at the airport, but did not specify how many victims there were.
The aircraft is a twin-engine turboprop ATR 72-500, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24. However, VOEPASS did not immediately confirm this.
The aircraft’s manufacturer, the French-Italian ATR, said in a statement that it had been informed that this aircraft model was involved in the accident. The company’s specialists were “fully committed to supporting both the investigation and the customer.”
The ATR 72 is generally used for shorter flights. The aircraft are built by a joint venture between Airbus in France and Leonardo SpA in Italy. Since the 1990s, crashes involving various models of the ATR 72 have claimed 470 lives, according to a database maintained by the Aviation Safety Network.
The Capela district, where the plane crashed, is far from the center of the wealthy city of 77,000 inhabitants.
The plane took off from Cascavel in the state of Paraná.
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AP video journalist Tatiana Pollastri contributed from Vinhedo
