VINHEDO, Brazil — A passenger plane crashed into a gated community in the Brazilian state of São Paulo on Friday, killing all 61 people on board and leaving behind a smoldering wreckage, authorities and the airline said.
Authorities did not say whether anyone was killed in the neighborhood where the plane landed in the city of Vinhedo, about 80 kilometers northwest of the metropolis of Sao Paulo. But witnesses on site said there were no casualties among the residents.
The airline Voepass said its plane, an ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop, was en route to Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo with 57 passengers and four crew on board when it crashed in Vinhedo. It provided a flight manifest with the names of the passengers, but not their nationalities. In an earlier statement, it said there were 58 passengers on board.
“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.”
It was the deadliest plane crash since January 2023, when 72 people died aboard a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal that went into a spin on approach and crashed. That plane was also an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error.
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 declared three days of national mourning on Friday evening.
Firefighters, military police and the state’s civil defense sent teams to the scene. São Paulo’s Security Minister Guilherme Derrite confirmed to reporters that no survivors had been found. He also said that the plane’s black box had been recovered.
“I thought it was going to fall in our garden,” a local resident and witness who gave her name only as Ana Lucia de Lima 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.”
The governor of the state of Paraná, Ratinho Júnior, told journalists in Vinhedo that many of the passengers were doctors from his state who were attending a seminar.
“They were used to saving lives and now they have lost their lives in such tragic circumstances,” said Júnior, adding that he had friends on board. “It is a sad day.”
A video obtained and verified by the Associated Press from a witness 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 showed the plane entering a shallow spin.
A report from Globo television’s weather service said the possibility of ice formation in the Vinhedo region had been confirmed. Local media quoted analysts as saying icing was a possible cause of the crash.
However, aviation expert Lito Sousa warned that meteorological conditions alone may not be enough to explain the exact cause of the plane crash.
“Analyzing a plane crash based only on images can lead to incorrect conclusions about the causes,” Sousa told the AP by phone. “But we can see a plane that has lost traction and is not reaching horizontal speed. In this state of shallow spin, there is no way to regain control of the plane.”
And Marcelo Moura, operations manager at Voepass, told reporters on Friday evening that although there were ice forecasts, they were within an acceptable range for the aircraft.
Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Henrique Baldi of the Brazilian Air Force’s Aircraft Accident Investigation and Prevention Center also told reporters at a late afternoon press conference that it was too early to confirm whether ice was the cause of the accident.
The aircraft is “certified for flights in extreme icing conditions in several countries, including countries other than ours where the effects of icing are more severe,” said Baldi, head of the center’s investigation department.
In an earlier statement, the center said the plane’s pilots neither called for help nor stated that they were operating in adverse weather conditions.
In a separate statement, Brazil’s federal police said they had already begun their investigation and deployed specialists in plane crashes and identifying disaster victims.
Authorities began transferring the bodies to the morgue on Friday and asked the victims’ families to bring all medical examination results, X-rays and dental photographs to help identify the bodies.
The French-Italian aircraft manufacturer ATR said in a statement that it had been informed that its ATR 72-500 model had been 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 on Friday, is far from the center of the wealthy city of 77,000 inhabitants. The plane had taken off from Cascavel in the state of Paraná.
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Sá Pessoa reported from Guarulhos. AP video journalist Tatiana Pollastri contributed from Vinhedo. AP writer David Koenig contributed from Dallas.
