A passenger plane with 61 people aboard crashed into a gated residential community in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state Friday, killing all aboard and leaving a smoldering wreck, officials and the airline said.
Officials gave no immediate word on any casualties on the ground in the city of Vinhedo, about 50 miles northwest of Sao Paulo, but witnesses said there were no victims among neighborhood residents.
The airline Voepass said that the ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop was headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos with 57 passengers and four crew members aboard when it crashed in Vinhedo.
The company said it was prioritizing “unrestricted assistance to the victims’ families and effectively collaborating with authorities to determine the causes of the accident.”
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.
Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority dispatched teams to the crash site. Sao Paulo’s public security secretary Guilherme Derrite spoke to reporters and confirmed that no survivors were found. He also said the plane’s black box was found, apparently intact.
“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 by the Associated Press from a bystander and verified shows at least two bodies near flaming pieces of wreckage.
Brazilian television network GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area on fire with smoke coming out of an obliterated plane fuselage. Additional footage on GloboNews earlier showed the plane drifting downward vertically, spiraling as it fell.
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.
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.
The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.
Savarese and Sá Pessoa write for the Associated Press. AP videojournalist Tatiana Pollastri contributed from Vinhedo. AP writer David Koenig contributed from Dallas.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .
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