Brazilian authorities retrieve remains of all 62 people killed in fiery plane crash
Brazilian authorities are working to piece together what exactly caused a plane with 62 people aboard to crash in a fiery wreck in Sao Paulo state on Friday.
Local airline Voepass' plane, an ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop, was headed for Sao Paulo's international airport in Guarulhos with 58 passengers and 4 crew members when it went down inside a gated community in the city of Vinhedo. The plane took off from Cascavel Airport at 11:46 a.m. local time, the airline said.
The airline initially said the plane had 62 occupants, then it revised the number to 61. Early on Saturday, it raised the figure once again after it found a passenger named Costantino Thé Maia was not on its original list.
Rescue teams Saturday retrieved the remains of all 62 occupants from the wreckage. Sao Paulo state government said in a statement that rescue operations finished at 6:30 p.m. local time, with the identification of the bodies of the pilot and co-pilot by forensics experts. There were 34 male and 28 female bodies in the wreckage, the government said.
The airline said Saturday afternoon all passengers on the aircraft were Brazilians, although four had dual citizenship — three Venezuelans and one Portuguese.
Earlier, Maycon Cristo, a spokesman for the local fire department, told journalists in Vinhedo that a winch was used to remove parts of the plane from the ground.
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 shared the news. He said that it appeared that all passengers and crew aboard had died, without elaborating as to how that information had been obtained.
"Very sad," he wrote on social media. "All my solidarity to the families and friends of the victims."
Images recorded by witnesses showed the aircraft in a flat spin and plunging vertically before smashing to the ground inside the gated community and leaving an obliterated fuselage consumed by fire.
Brazilian television network GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area with smoke coming out of an obliterated plane fuselage. Additional footage on GloboNews earlier showed the plane drifting downward vertically, spiraling as it fell.
Residents said there were no injuries on the ground.
"I thought it was going to fall in our yard," a 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 victims among the locals. It seems that the 62 people inside the plane were the real victims, though."
Rain drizzled down on rescue workers as they recovered the first bodies from the scene in the chill of the Southern Hemisphere's winter. Some residents of the condominium silently left to spend the night elsewhere.
It was the world's deadliest airline crash since January 2023, when 72 people died on board a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal that stalled and crashed while making its landing approach. That plane also was an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error.
A report Friday from Brazilian television network Globo's meteorological center said it "confirmed the possibility of the formation of ice in the region of Vinhedo," and local media cited experts pointing to icing as a potential cause for the crash.
But Brazilian aviation expert Lito Sousa cautioned that meteorological conditions alone might not be enough to explain why the plane fell in the manner that it did on Friday.
"Analyzing an air crash just with images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes," Sousa told the AP by phone. "But we can see a plane with loss of support, no horizontal speed. In this flat spin condition, there's no way to reclaim control of the plane."
FlightRadar24 said in a social media post that in the area where the plane crashed, there was an "active warning for severe icing" between 12,000 feet and 21,000 feet. FlightRadar24 said the aircraft was flying at an altitude of 17,000 feet just before the crash
Speaking to reporters Friday in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo Public Security Secretary Guilherme Derrite said the plane's black box had been recovered, apparently in a preserved state.
Marcelo Moura, director of operations for Voepass, told reporters Friday night that, while there were forecasts for ice, they were within acceptable levels for the aircraft.
Likewise, Lt. Col. Carlos Henrique Baldi of the Brazilian air force's center for the investigation and prevention of air accidents, told reporters in a late afternoon press conference that it was still too early to confirm whether ice caused the crash.
The plane is "certified in several countries to fly in severe icing conditions, including in countries unlike ours, where the impact of ice is more significant," said Baldi, who heads the center's investigation division.
Brazil's Federal Police began its own investigation, and dispatched specialists in plane crashes and the identification of disaster victims, it said in a statement.
The plane's manufacturer, French-Italian ATR, said in a statement that it had been informed that the accident involved that model of plane, and said company specialists are "fully engaged to support both the investigation and the customer."
The ATR 72 is generally used on shorter flights. The planes are built by a joint venture of Airbus in France and Italy's Leonardo S.p.A.
Crashes involving various models of the ATR 72 have resulted in 470 deaths going back to the 1990s, according to a database of the Aviation Safety Network.
Brazilian authorities began transferring the corpses to the morgue Friday and called on victims' family members to bring any medical, X-ray and dental exams to help identify the bodies. Blood tests were also done to help identification efforts.
Costa Filho, the airport's minister, said the air force's center will also conduct a criminal probe of the accident.
"We will investigate so this case is fully explained to the Brazilian people," he said.
"Not a normal movement for a plane"
Nathalie Cicari, who lives near the crash site, told CNN Brasil the impact was "terrifying."
"I was having lunch, I heard a very loud noise very close by," she said, describing the sound as drone-like but "much louder."
"I went out on the balcony and saw the plane spinning. Within seconds, I realized that it was not a normal movement for a plane," she told the broadcaster.
Cicari was not hurt but had to evacuate her house, which was filled with black smoke from the crash.
Teams of firefighters, military police and state civil defense were deployed in the Capela neighborhood, in Vinhedo.
The doomed plane recorded its first flight in April 2010, according to the website planespotters.net.
— AFP contributed to this report.