A plane operated by the Brazilian airline VoePass crashed in the country’s Sao Paulo state on Friday, killing all 61 people on board, the company said Friday.
The aircraft involved in the fiery wreck in a residential area in the city of Vinhedo was carrying 57 passengers and four crew, according to The Associated Press. The plane departed from Cascavel, Brazil, in the state of Parana.
“The company regrets to inform that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died locally,” the airline said in a statement.
Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority all dispatched teams to the crash site.
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It was not clear how many people were injured or killed. Fox News Digital has reached out to the airline.
Brazilian TV network GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area on fire with smoke coming out of an obliterated plane fuselage. Additional footage showed the plane drifting downward vertically, spiraling as it fell.
“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.”
The Capela neighborhood where the plane crashed sits far from the center of the city that’s 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 the Guarulhos airport told the Associated Press that the company was notifying victims’ family members and supporting them at a private room in the airport. They didn’t specify how many victims.
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He said that it appeared that all passengers and crew aboard had died, without elaborating as to how that information had been obtained.
Aviation expert and former pilot Arthur Rosenberg said video of the plane appears to show the airliner stalling in midair.
“A stall is when the plane is not moving through the air fast enough, forward motion, to be able to maintain lift to stay in the air,” he told Fox News Channel’s “The Story.” “The sound tells me there was something wrong with one or both engines.”
The radar data shows a “rapid descent,” which could have been attributed to an engine failure or some other malfunction, he said.
“It looked like it dropped 17,000 feet in about two minutes,” Rosenberg said.
The airliner is an ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop, according to FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, though VOEPASS didn’t immediately confirm that. The aircraft is used for shorter flights.
In a statement, the plane’s manufacturer, French-Italian ATR, said company specialists are “fully engaged to support both the investigation and the customer.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
