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VINHEDO, Brazil (AP) — A passenger plane crashed into a gated residential community in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state Friday, killing all 61 people aboard and leaving a smoldering wreck, officials and the airline said.
Officials did not say if anyone was killed on the ground in the neighborhood where the plane landed in the city of Vinhedo, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) northwest of the metropolis of Sao Paulo. But witnesses at the scene said there were no victims among local residents.
The airline Voepass said that its plane, an ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop, was headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos with 57 passengers and 4 crew members aboard when it crashed in Vinhedo. It provided a flight manifest with passenger names, but not their nationalities. A prior statement had said there were 58 passengers.
“The company regrets to inform that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died at the site,” Voepass said in a statement. “At this time, Voepass is prioritizing provision of unrestricted assistance to the victims’ families and effectively collaborating with authorities to determine the causes of the accident.”
It was the 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.
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. Sao Paulo state’s Gov. Tarcisio de Freitas declared three days of mourning.
The state’s firefighters, military police and civil defense authority dispatched teams to the location. Sao Paulo’s public security secretary Guilherme Derrite spoke to reporters and confirmed that no survivors had been found. He also said the plane’s black box was recovered.
“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.”
Video obtained from a witness by The Associated Press and verified shows at least two bodies strewn about flaming pieces of wreckage.
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 in a flat spin.
Flight tracking website Flightradar24 said data sent from the plane indicated it was diving at 8,000 to 24,000 feet per minute in the last 60 seconds of the flight.
A report from 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 analysts pointing to icing as a potential cause for the crash.
But aviation expert Mila Lilo Sousa cautioned that meteorological conditions alone might not be enough to explain why the plane fell as it did.
“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.”
The Brazilian air force’s center for the investigation and prevention of air accidents said in a statement that pilots didn’t respond to calls from air traffic control in Sao Paulo, nor did they call for help or say they were operating under adverse weather conditions.
In a separate statement, Brazil’s Federal Police said it already had begun its investigation, and had dispatched specialists in plane crashes and the identification of disaster victims to help.
Authorities began transferring the corpses to the morgue on Friday, and called on victims’ family members to bring any medical, x-ray and dental exams in order as a means to help identify the bodies.
French-Italian plane manufacturer ATR said in a statement that it had been informed that the accident involved its ATR 72-500 model, and said company specialists are “fully engaged to support both the investigation and the customer.”
The ATR 72 generally is 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.
The Capela neighborhood where the plane crashed Friday sits in a district far from the center of the prosperous city that’s home to 77,000 residents. It had departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.
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Sá Pessoa reported from Guarulhos. AP videojournalist Tatiana Pollastri contributed from Vinhedo. AP writer David Koenig contributed from Dallas.