SAO PAULO – Families of victims of a plane crash in Brazil gathered at a morgue and hotels in Sao Paulo on Sunday as forensic experts work to identify the remains of the 62 people killed in the disaster.

Local authorities said the bodies of pilot Danilo Santos Romano and his co-pilot Humberto de Campos Alencar e Silva were the first to be identified by forensic experts.

The government of the state of Sao Paulo announced on Saturday evening that the remains of all victims had been recovered. 34 male and 28 female bodies were found in the rubble, it said.

The twin-engine turboprop ATR 72 aircraft of the Brazilian airline Voepass was en route to Guarulhos International Airport in Sao Paulo with 58 passengers and four crew members when it crashed in Vinhedo, 78 kilometers north of the metropolis, on Friday. According to Voepass, three passengers, who had Brazilian IDs, also had Venezuelan documents, and one had Portuguese ones.

There were at least eight doctors on board, said Ratinho Júnior, governor of the state of Paraná. Four professors from the Unioeste in western Paraná were also declared dead.

Three-year-old Liz Ibba dos Santos, who was traveling with her father, was the only known child on the passenger list. The remains of Luna, a dog traveling with a Venezuelan family, were found in the wreckage.

The Sao Paulo morgue began receiving the first bodies on Friday evening and asked the victims’ relatives to bring medical records, X-rays and dental records to facilitate the identification of the bodies. Blood tests were also carried out to facilitate identification.

The few family members who spoke about the tragedy did so on social media.

Tânia Azevedo, who lost her son Tiago in the crash, was accommodated in one of the hotels in Sao Paulo, but said in a post that she was waiting to be taken to the morgue.

“I think Tiago is somewhere trying to help the other injured who also need light and love,” she said. “I couldn’t go there (to the morgue). I’m waiting here. It’s dark here, I need some light and love myself.”

Images taken by witnesses showed the plane spinning flat and plummeting vertically before hitting the ground in a residential complex, leaving a mangled, fire-ravaged fuselage. Local residents said there were no injuries on the ground.

It was the world’s deadliest plane crash since January 2023, when 72 people died on 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.

Metsul, one of Brazil’s most respected weather services, said on Friday there were reports of severe icing in Sao Paulo state at the time of the crash. Local media quoted experts as saying icing was a possible cause of the accident.

A video shared on social media channels on Saturday shows a Voepass pilot telling passengers on a flight from Guarulhos to the city of Cascavel, the departure point of the crashed plane, that the ATR 72 had flown safely around the world for decades. He also asked passengers to preserve the memory of his colleagues and the airline and asked for prayers.

“This tragedy not only affects the people who died in this accident. It affects all of us,” said the unidentified pilot. “We are giving our whole heart and our best to be here and to fulfill our mission of getting you to your destination safely and comfortably.”

Police restricted access to the main entrance of the Sao Paulo morgue, where the bodies from the accident were being identified. Some of the victims’ relatives arrived on foot, others in minivans. No one spoke to journalists, and authorities asked not to film them as they arrived.

A plane carrying other family members from the state of Paraná landed at Guarulhos airport on Saturday afternoon. They also did not want to speak to journalists. A minivan sponsored by the airline was provided to transport them to the morgue.

Many family members gathered at a hotel in downtown Sao Paulo and refused to speak to the media there too.

On October 31, 1994, an American Eagle ATR 72-200 crashed. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the probable cause was ice formation while the aircraft was circling in a holding pattern. The aircraft rolled over the shore at an altitude of about 8,000 feet and crashed to the ground, killing all 68 people on board. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued operating instructions for ATRs and similar aircraft instructing pilots not to use the autopilot in icing conditions.

Brazilian aviation expert Lito Sousa warned that meteorological conditions alone may not be enough to explain the way the Voepass plane crashed on Friday.

“Analyzing a plane crash based only on images can lead to incorrect conclusions about the causes,” Sousa told The Associated Press by phone. “But we can see a plane that has lost traction and no longer has horizontal speed. In that state of shallow spin, there is no way to regain control of the plane.”

The Brazilian Air Force said on Saturday that both of the plane’s flight recorders had been sent to its analysis laboratory in the capital Brasilia. The results of the investigation are expected to be published within 30 days, it said.

Marcelo Moura, operations manager at Voepass, told reporters on Friday evening that although ice formation had been forecast, the amount was acceptable for the aircraft.

The Brazilian Air Force’s Aircraft Accident Investigation and Prevention Center had previously stated that the plane’s pilots had neither called for help nor declared that they were operating in adverse weather conditions.

The ATR 72, built by a joint venture between France’s Airbus and Italy’s Leonardo SpA, is typically used for shorter flights. Crashes involving various models of the ATR 72 have claimed 470 lives since the 1990s, according to a database maintained by the Aviation Safety Network.

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Pollastri reported from Vinhedo.