A plane with 62 people aboard crashed in a fiery wreck in a residential area of a city in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state Friday, the airline said, but it was not immediately clear how many people were injured or killed.
The airline Voepass confirmed in a statement that a plane headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos crashed in the city of Vinhedo with 58 passengers and four crew members aboard. The statement didn’t say what caused 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. He said that it appeared that all passengers and crew aboard had died, without elaborating as to how that information had been obtained.
Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority dispatched teams to the crash site in Vinhedo. Authorities sealed off the entrance to the residential area where the plane went down, as journalists waited outside for updates.
“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.
The Brazilian air force’s center for the investigation and prevention of air accidents said in a statement that it has a team en route to the crash site. In a separate statement, Brazil's Federal Police said it had begun its investigation.
Voepass staff at the Guarulhos airport told the AP that the company is notifying victims’ family members and supporting them at a private room in the airport, but didn't specify how many victims.
The plane is an ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop, according to FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, though the airline didn't immediately confirm that.
That plane’s manufacturer, French-Italian ATR, said in a statement that it had been informed that the accident involved that model of plane, 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.
The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.
Savarese and Sá Pessoa write for the Associated Press.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .
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