A plane belonging to the Brazilian airline VoePass crashed in the state of São Paulo on Friday. All 61 people on board were killed, the company said on Friday.
The plane involved in the fire in a residential area in the city of Vinhedo was carrying 57 passengers and four crew members, according to the Associated Press. The plane took off from Cascavel, Brazil, in the state of Parana.
“The company regrets to announce that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died at the scene,” the airline said in a statement.
Firefighters, military police and civil protection authorities dispatched teams to the crash site.
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The plane crashed in the Brazilian city of Vinhedo in the state of Sao Paulo. (Fox News)
It is unclear how many people were injured or killed. Fox News Digital has contacted the airline.
Brazilian television station GloboNews showed aerial footage of a burning area with smoke rising from the destroyed fuselage. Other footage showed the plane drifting vertically downward and spinning as it fell.
“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.”
This single frame from video shows fire coming from a plane that crashed next to a house in Vinhedo, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, on Friday. (Felipe Magalhaes Filho via AP)
The Capela district, where the plane crashed, is far from the center of the city, which has a population of 77,000.
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 announced the news.
VoePass employees at Guarulhos airport told the Associated Press that the company was notifying the victims’ families and assisting them in a private room at the airport. The number of victims was notified.
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He said it appeared that all passengers and crew on board had died, but did not elaborate on how he had obtained this information.
Aviation expert and former pilot Arthur Rosenberg said video of the plane appeared to show the aircraft spinning in mid-air.
“A stall is when the airplane is not moving forward through the air fast enough to maintain lift and stay airborne,” he told Fox News Channel’s “The Story.” “The sound tells me there’s something wrong with one or both engines.”
Radar data showed a “rapid descent” that could be due to an engine failure or other malfunction, he said.
A passenger plane crashed in Brazil on Friday.
“It looked like it had crashed 17,000 feet in about two minutes,” Rosenberg said.
The aircraft is a twin-engine turboprop ATR 72-500, according to FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website. However, VOEPASS did not immediately confirm this. The aircraft is used for shorter flights.
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The aircraft’s manufacturer, the French-Italian ATR, said in a statement that the company’s specialists were “fully committed to supporting both the investigation and the customer.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
