An investigation is currently in progress after a passenger plane on Friday afternoon crashed into a residential area in São Paulo, Brazil, killing all 61 people on board.
Following the crash, the state’s firefighters, military police, and civil defense authority dispatched teams to the crash site.
Videos circulated on social media showed the plane falling out of the sky before hitting the ground, where its fuselage was engulfed in flames.
The airline confirmed that there were 57 passengers and four crew members on the flight and expressed regrets, writing in a statement that:
“At this time, Voepass is prioritizing the provision of unrestricted assistance to the victims’ families and effectively collaborating with authorities to determine the causes of the accident,” as a São Paulo state official confirmed the plane’s black box flight recorder had been found.
Authorities began moving the corpses to the mortuary on Friday and called on family members of the victims to bring any medical, X-ray, and dental exams to help identify the victims.
Brazil’s federal police also confirmed that they had dispatched specialists in plane crashes and the identification of disaster victims.
Although Voepass is yet to disclose what may have caused the crash, the flight tracker website FlightRadar24 revealed that there was an active warning for “severe icing” at an altitude of between 12,000 feet and 21,000 feet, and that the aircraft had been flying at 17,000 feet immediately prior to the crash.
However, Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Henrique Baldi, of the Brazilian Air Force’s Centre for the Investigation and Prevention of Air Accidents, said the 14-year-old ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop plane was “certified in several countries to fly in severe icing conditions, including in countries unlike ours, where the impact of ice is more significant.”
Aviation expert Lito Sousa also cautioned via AP that “analyzing an air crash just with images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes.”
“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,” she added in a phone call with AP.
The aircraft manufacturer ATR said their first thoughts were with all the individuals affected by the event and that their company specialists were fully involved in the crash investigations.
In response to the tragic news, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, at an event in Southern Brazil, asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute of silence for the victims. He also declared three days of mourning.
