A plane operated by Brazilian airline Vaupas crashed in the country’s Sao Paulo state on Friday, killing all 61 people on board, the company announced on Friday.
According to the Associated Press, the plane involved in the fire in a residential area of the city of Vinhedo had 57 passengers and four crew members on board after taking off from Cascavel in the Brazilian state of Parana.
“We regret to announce that all 61 passengers on board Flight 2283 have died locally,” the airline said in a statement.
The fire brigade, military police and civil defense authorities all sent teams to the crash site.
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The plane crashed in the city of Vinhedo, Sao Paulo state, Brazil. (Fox News)
Brazilian television station Globonews aired aerial footage showing fire and smoke coming from the wrecked plane’s fuselage, with additional footage showing the plane descending vertically and spiralling as it fell.
“I thought it was going to fall into my garden,” a resident and witness who gave her name as Ana Lucia told reporters near the crash site. “It was scary, but I’m glad no local residents were killed. But it seems the real victims were the 62 people on board.”
A frame from the video shows flames coming from the plane that crashed near a house in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, on Friday. (Felipe Magalhães Filho via AP)
The Capella area where the plane crashed is far from the city center, which is home to 77,000 people.
Speaking at an event in southern Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva broke the news as he asked the crowd to stand and observe a minute’s silence.
A VoePass staff member at Guarulhos airport told The Associated Press that the company had notified the families of the victims and was supporting them in private rooms at the airport, but did not say how many people were killed.
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He said all passengers and crew on board appeared to have been killed, but did not elaborate on how he had received that information.
Aviation expert and former pilot Arthur Rosenberg said video from the flight appears to show the aircraft stalling in the air.
“A stall is when the plane can’t move forward fast enough and maintain lift to stay in the air,” he told Fox News Channel’s “The Story.” “The sound told us there was something wrong with one or both of the engines.”
Radar data showed a “rapid drop” that could be due to engine failure or some other malfunction, he said.
A passenger plane crashed in Brazil on Friday.
“It looked like we fell 17,000 feet in about two minutes,” Rosenberg said.
The plane is an ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop, according to flight tracking website FlightRadar24, but VOEPASS could not immediately confirm this. The aircraft is used for short-haul flights.
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The plane’s manufacturer, the Franco-Italian ATR, said in a statement that its experts were “doing all they can to assist both the investigation and our customer.”
The plane’s black boxes, or flight data recorders, have been recovered by authorities.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
