A passenger plane crashed near São Paulo in Brazil on Friday. A video shows the plane plummeting to the ground. Passengers who did not make it on board are stunned.
62 people feared dead in passenger plane crash in Brazil
After the crash of a passenger plane with 62 passengers in Brazil, there are fears for the lives of all people. The cause of the crash is still unclear.
A regional plane with 61 people on board crashed in a residential area in Brazil on Friday. All passengers died, the airline said, while rescue workers searched the area.
At a press conference on Friday afternoon, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said “I have to deliver really bad news” and called for a minute’s silence to remember the passengers of the plane that crashed in Vinhedo, a city northwest of São Paulo. The cause of the crash is unknown, he said.
“It seems like everyone died,” Lula said.
In a social media post, Voepass, a regional airline based in the state of São Paulo, confirmed the crash of Flight 2283. There were 57 passengers and four crew members on board, all with Brazilian documents. There were no survivors. In an earlier statement, it said the plane had 58 passengers on board.
Some of the passengers were doctors from Paraná who were on their way to a seminar, Paraná Governor Ratinho Júnior told reporters.
“These were people who were used to saving lives and now they have lost their lives in such tragic circumstances,” he said.
The plane took off from Cascavel, a Brazilian city near the country’s southern border with Paraguay and Argentina, and was en route to São Paulo’s main international airport in Guarulhos, the Voepass post said.
According to data from FlightAware, the aircraft, a twin-engine ATR-72 turboprop, took off at 11:50 a.m. local time and was scheduled to land shortly before 2:00 p.m.
City officials in Valinhos, near Vinhedo, said a house in the local residential complex was damaged but none of the residents were injured.
Three people were denied access to the aircraft
Brazilian news channel UOL reported that at least three passengers were denied boarding the plane before it took off from the city of Cascavel in the state of Paraná.
“I missed my plane and the plane I missed crashed. Did you see the news?” one of the lucky passengers, Adriano Silva de Assis, can be seen emotionally telling his daughter in a video posted on UOL and social media. “It’s a good thing,” Silva de Assis continues. “I love you, I love you so much.”
Brazilian media reported that the passengers were initially angry with the flight crew for denying them access to the plane.
UOL also interviewed a neighbor of the property where the plane crashed, who told the station that he believed the pilot was trying to steer the plane away from residential buildings as it fell from the sky.
“I’m not an expert, but it looked like the pilot wanted to miss the houses and therefore flew into the gated community,” gardener Gildo Pacheco told the broadcaster.
Pacheco said he heard loud noises from above and went outside, where he saw the plane spiraling down. He told his mother to seek shelter in the basement, but saw the plane crash into an adjacent residential area.
As the plane hit the ground, Pacheco heard a loud explosion, followed by another explosion a few minutes later.
Officials say plane’s black box found
The São Paulo state government said on social media that civil defense and public security officers had been mobilized in the Capela neighborhood of Vinhedo to respond to the accident. Firefighters were called at around 1 p.m. local time and seven teams were immediately dispatched to the scene, the government post said.
Local hospitals were prepared to help all patients.
“My solidarity goes out to all the victims and those affected by this tragedy,” said the governor of the state of São Paulo, Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, in a social media post.
The Associated Press reported that Brazilian authorities had blocked access to the residential area where the plane crashed.
Marcelo Moreno, head of the Brazilian Center for the Investigation of Aviation Accidents CENIPA, pointed out in a press conference that it was still too early to determine the cause of the crash, but gave a first insight into the investigation.
“As far as we can tell so far, the aircraft did not contact air traffic control and report an emergency,” Moreno said.
Marcel Moura, chief operations officer of Voepass, said at a press conference on Friday that ice had been forecast at the altitudes at which the plane was flying, but that the probability was “within the acceptable range”.
“But the aircraft is sensitive to icing. That could be a starting point,” Moura added, noting that the aircraft’s de-icing system and the rest of the plane were deemed operational before takeoff.
São Paulo state official Guilherme Derrite said the plane’s flight recorder had been recovered and appeared to be intact.
The aircraft’s manufacturer, ATR, issued a statement on Friday saying it had been informed of the crash.
“Our first thoughts are with everyone affected by this incident. ATR’s specialists are fully engaged in supporting both the investigation and the customer,” the company wrote.
A video shared by the website BNO News shows a plane with the identification number 2283 spinning out of control and crashing behind a group of trees near houses, followed by a large cloud of black smoke.
Local resident Daniel de Lima heard a loud noise before looking out of his apartment in Vinhedo and seeing the plane in a horizontal spiral.
“It was rotating but not moving forward,” he told Reuters. “Shortly afterward, it fell from the sky and exploded.”
Footage from news channel UOL showed the plane torn to pieces and still burning between red tiled roofs and trees in the Vinhedo district, about 80 kilometers northwest of São Paulo.
The plane may have gone into a spin before crashing
Jaafar El-Awady, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University, told USA TODAY he was stunned by the videos showing the plane falling from the sky.
“It doesn’t look like it flew down. It looks more like a rock fell from the sky,” El-Awady said, suggesting the plane stalled in mid-air. However, confirmation of what happened and why could take months or even years, depending on the root cause.
To stay airborne, a plane must maintain a certain speed. If the speed drops below that threshold, the plane begins to descend, El-Awady said. Pilots are trained to recover from a stall, but if a plane has sustained critical damage, such as problems with the wings or tail, and has an engine failure, the mission can be doomed.
Because the plane that crashed on Friday had two engines, the pilot would have been able to fly and land even if only one engine had failed and there had been no other damage, El-Awady said.
For me as an aerospace engineer who is committed to aviation safety, such an incident is a huge burden.
“We still have a lot to do to ensure that such incidents do not happen again,” he said.
Previous plane crashes in Brazil
According to the Aviation Safety Network, three of South America’s deadliest plane crashes occurred in Brazil. The network is a service of the Flight Safety Foundation, an international nonprofit organization focused on researching and promoting aviation safety.
On July 17, 2007, all 187 people on board a commercial airliner died in a crash on the runway at São Paulo-Congonhas Airport. According to a report by the Brazilian Aircraft Accident Investigation and Prevention Center, 12 people on the ground were also killed in the crash, which sparked a fire that could not be extinguished for hours.
Less than a year earlier, a domestic passenger plane and a business jet collided in mid-air, the Aviation Safety Network reported. All 154 people on board the Boeing 737 died, while the plane’s seven passengers survived.
And in the summer of 1982, the Aviation Safety Network said the second worst accident of the year occurred. A plane captain accidentally descended well below 1,500 meters because he was distracted by the bright lights of the city of Fortaleza, despite two altitude warnings and the co-pilot warning of mountains, the network said. The plane he was piloting crashed into a wooded mountainside at an altitude of 600 meters. All 137 people on board died.
Contribute: Reuters
