Vinhedo, Sao Paulo state, Brazil (TIP): A plane carrying 58 passengers and four crew crashed on August 9 in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state, killing everyone on board, local officials said. The aircraft, a French-made ATR 72-500 operated by the airline Voepass, was travelling from Cascavel in southern Parana State to Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos international airport when it crashed in the city of Vinhedo.
Brazilian television network 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, spiralling as it fell.
“There were no survivors,” the city government in Valinhos, which was involved in the rescue and recovery operation in nearby Vinhedo, said in an email sent to AFP.
A video The Associated Press obtained from a bystander and verified shows at least two bodies strewn about flaming pieces of wreckage.
In a statement, Voepass reported “an accident involving flight 2283.”
“There is still no confirmation of how the accident occurred,” it said.
The city of Vinhedo, with about 76,000 residents, is located approximately 80 kilometres (50 miles) northwest of Sao Paulo. 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. Sao Paulo’s fire department wrote on social network X: “Aircraft crash, 7 teams involved, so far only this information.”
‘Terrifying’
Nathalie Cicari, who lives near the crash site, told CNN Brasil the impact was “terrifying.”
“I was having lunch when 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 realised 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 defence were deployed in the Capela neighbourhood in Vinhedo.
The doomed plane recorded its first flight in April 2010, according to the website planespotters.net. (AFP)