Plane with 62 people aboard crashes in fiery wreck in Brazil
A plane with 62 people aboard crashed in a fiery wreck in a residential area of a city in Brazil's Sao Paulo state Friday, the airline said. It was not immediately clear how many people were injured or killed but the country's president said everyone on board was presumed dead.
The airline VoePass confirmed in a statement that a plane headed for Sao Paulo's international airport in Guarulhos crashed with 58 passengers and 4 crew members aboard. The statement didn't say what caused the accident.
Brazilian television network GloboNews, citing the airline, reported the aircraft was a turboprop ATR-72 passenger plane.
Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority dispatched teams to the crash site in Vinhedo, the government said in a statement. The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.
GloboNews showed footage of a large area on fire and smoke coming out of an apparent plane fuselage in a residential area full of houses. Additional footage on GloboNews showed a plane drifting downward vertically, spiraling as it fell.
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."
Video the AP obtained from a bystander and verified shows at least two bodies strewn about flaming pieces of wreckage.
Flight tracker FlightRadar24 said on social media that it was "currently processing granular data from this flight."
In a subsequent social media post, FlightRadar24 said that in the area where the VoePass plane crashed, there was an "active warning for severe icing" between 12,000 feet and 21,000 feet. FlightRadar said the aircraft was flying at an altitude of 17,000 feet just before the crash.
The city of Vinhedo, the site of the crash, is located about 50 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.
The crash comes less than a year after 12 people, including a baby, died in a plane crash in the Brazilian Amazon.
"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.
