A plane operated by Brazilian airline VoePass crashed in Sao Paulo state on Friday, killing all 61 people on board, the company said Friday.
The plane involved in the fiery crash in a residential area of the town of Vinhedo was carrying 57 passengers and four crew members, according to The Associated Press. The plane took off from Cascavel, Brazil, in the state of Paraná.
“The company regrets to inform that all 61 people on board flight 2283 have died locally,” the airline said in a statement.
Firefighters, military police and civil defence teams attended the scene of the accident.
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The plane crashed in the Brazilian city of Vinhedo, in the state of Sao Paulo. (Fox News)
Brazilian television network GloboNews showed aerial images of a burning area with smoke billowing from the wrecked fuselage of a plane. Additional images showed the plane spiraling downwards.
“I thought it was going to fall in our yard,” a neighbor and witness who gave her name only as Ana Lucia told reporters near the crash site. “It was terrifying, but thank God there were no victims among the neighbors. However, it seems that the 62 people on board the plane were the real victims.”
This screenshot from a video shows fire coming from a plane that crashed near a house in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, on Friday. (Felipe Magalhaes Filho via AP)
The Capela neighborhood where the plane crashed is located far from the city center, home to 77,000 residents.
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.
VoePass staff at Guarulhos airport told The Associated Press that the company was notifying the victims' families and providing support in a private room at the airport. They did not specify how many victims there were.
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He said it appeared that all passengers and crew on board had died, without giving further details on how that information had been obtained.
Aviation expert and former pilot Arthur Rosenberg said video of the plane appears to show the plane stopping in mid-air.
“A stall is when the airplane is not moving through the air fast enough, in forward motion, to be able to maintain lift and stay in the air,” he said on Fox News Channel's “The Story.” “The sound tells me there was something wrong with one or both engines.”
Radar data shows a “rapid descent,” which could have been attributed to engine failure or some other malfunction, he said.
A passenger plane crashed in Brazil on Friday.
“It looked like he had dropped 17,000 feet in about two minutes,” Rosenberg said.
According to FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, the plane is an ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop, although VOEPASS did not immediately confirm this. The aircraft is used for short flights.
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In a statement, the plane's manufacturer, the Franco-Italian company ATR, said the company's specialists are “fully committed to supporting both the investigation and the customer.”
The plane's black box, or flight data recorder, has been recovered by officials.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
