A passenger plane crashed outside São Paulo in Brazil on August 9, killing at least 61 people on board, airline Voepass said.
“All 61 people on board flight 2283 died at the crash site,” Voepass said in a statement expressing deep regret over the incident. There were 57 passengers and four crew members on board, according to the company.
Footage circulating on social media showed the plane crash and its destroyed fuselage in flames on the ground. All the passengers are Brazilian citizens, airline officials said. A twin-engine turboprop plane the ATR 72-500, dropped 17,000 feet in just one minute, but it is not yet clear why, as per the flight tracking data.
A medical team is onsite and working to identify the victims, many of whom are too badly burned for visual identification, São Paolo’s Security Secretary Guilherme Derrite said at a press conference. Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva August 10, declared three days of mourning for the victims.
Videos of the crash on social media showed the plane spiraling out of the sky before hitting the ground as people in the neighborhood screamed in fear. Another video showed the wreckage of the plane in flames on the ground. No one on the ground was hurt, CNN quoted city officials as saying.
The flight left Cascavel, in the Brazilian state of Parana, and was en route to Guarulhos, in São Paulo state, when it lost signal shortly before 1:30 p.m. local time (12:30 p.m. ET), according to Flightradar24 data.
It began losing altitude a minute and a half before crashing on the ground. The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m. local time, when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds.
It lost just under 2,000 feet just eight seconds later. And, in approximately one minute, it began rapidly descending – losing roughly 17,000 feet in just one minute.
The last data transmission from the plane was at 1:22 p.m. local time.
Crash cause being ascertained
What caused the crash is still not known, Voepass CEO Eduardo Busch told a press conference.
“The entire crew was competent,” Busch said.
“We are waiting for access to all communications between the pilot and the control tower to have a broader understanding of what happened,” he added. Busch said the plane had two black boxes – devices that store flight data, which are built to withstand crashes – and that there are two highly qualified laboratories available to analyze them.
“On one hand, it is possible to retrieve data from the recorder, but on the other hand, there is a chance that, due to the severity of the accident, the recorders were damaged, making it impossible to access the recorded data,” Busch said.
Officials say the fire outbreaks from the crash are under control. “The bodies of the victims are being taken to the IML (Legal Medical Institute) in Campinas for legal proceedings,” Vinhedo City Hall said in a statement.
In order to help identify bodies, families have been asked to share medical documentation of the victims “like radiological, medical and/or dental exams,” said a statement released by the government of the state of São Paulo.
Interrupting a speech at an afternoon naval event to address the crash, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called for a minute of silence to mark the apparent deaths of the flight’s passengers and crew.
“I would like everyone to stand up so that we can observe a minute of silence because a plane has just crashed in the city of Vinhedo… and it appears they all died,” he said, in a video of his statement shared on X.
Voepass officials said that the company spent the afternoon securing hotels and psychologists for the victims’ families and supporting them.
Investigation underway
Vinhedo City Hall said in the August 9 statement that it is waiting for the Brazil Air Force team to start investigating the cause of the crash.
Brigadier Marcelo Moreno, who heads Brazil’s aviation accidents agency CENIPA, told the media that the aircraft crew had not communicated an emergency before the crash. “Preliminarily, we have this information that there was no information about the aircraft, that the aircraft was in any type of emergency whatsoever,” he told reporters.
Busch, the Voepass CEO, said the airline will work closely with CENIPA to investigate the crash. The Voepass airplane was manufactured in 2010 and purchased by the airline in September 2022, according to registration data from the Brazilian Aeronautical Registry.
