Brazil, Plane with 62 Passengers Crashes in Sao Paulo. No Survivors – Video of Plane Falling

The violence of the impact on the ground, after having lost four kilometers of altitude in less than two minutes, left no escape for the 62 people who were on board the Voepass plane, which crashed in Vinhedo, in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo.

The 58 passengers and 4 crew members all died instantly. Confirming the extent of the tragedy – announced shortly before by the municipality of Vinhedo – was President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva who, during a public event in Florianopolis, asked those present to observe a minute of silence for the victims of the impact, informing them of what had happened. The ATR-72 of the Voepass company had taken off at 11:56 local time from the Cascavel airport, in the state of Paraná, bound for Guarulhos. The crash occurred an hour and a half later. According to data from the FlightRadar24 portal, two minutes before the crash the plane was at an altitude of 17,200 feet, a minute later at 4,000 feet: it therefore lost about 4 kilometers of altitude in less than 2 minutes, crashing on João Edueta Street, in a common area of ​​the Recanto Florido residential complex. The impact also hit some homes, but the head of the civil protection, Osmir Aparecido Cruz, immediately ruled out any casualties among the residents. Numerous videos published on the internet by residents of the area – and picked up by the local press – show the plane falling straight into the vegetation of the hilly region, and then being engulfed in flames immediately after the impact. “The plane grazed us and then crashed,” said a witness still in shock: it fell a short distance from his home.

“Oh my God, it crashed into my neighbor’s house,” a woman exclaimed in tears, while filming one of the videos of the tragedy that has now gone viral on social media. Based on the slight spiral drawn during the fall, numerous experts interviewed by the Brazilian press hypothesize that the aircraft may have stalled. This theory is supported by the fact that, given the expected time of arrival in Guarulhos, the accident occurred during the landing phase, the moment in which the phenomenon is most likely to occur. Voepass has stated that it is not yet able to reconstruct the causes of the accident, while the Brazilian Air Force (Fab) has sent the investigators for aeronautical accidents (Seripa) to the site to carry out technical surveys. The federal police is also participating in the investigation, by order of the Ministry of Ports and Airports and the Ministry of Transport, which has already set up a crisis unit to ascertain the facts, at the Guarulhos airport. The governor of the state of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, has guaranteed the technical support of local authorities for the investigation. Meanwhile, the Anac, the Brazilian air traffic control agency, has already reported that the plane, manufactured in 2010, had regularly passed all safety checks. The airline has set up a support team to assist the families of the victims at the Guarulhos airport, while the Farnesina has also taken action and is carrying out the appropriate checks, together with the consulate general of São Paulo, “to exclude the presence of fellow countrymen” in the tragic accident. (ANSA).