Passenger: I Fought to Board Doomed Flight—Staff ‘Saved Me’

A man who was meant to board a passenger plane that crashed on the outskirts of São Paulo in Brazil credits an airline worker with saving his life after he was denied boarding at the gate.

Adriano Assis, from Rio De Janeiro, told Brazilian news outlet TV Globo that he narrowly missed the two-hour flight from Cascavel to Guarulhos after an airline mix-up at the airport.

“I arrived at 9:40 a.m., and LATAM was closed… so I waited to see if it would open,” Assis said, adding that he hadn’t realized he had actually booked his flight with the airline Voepass, not LATAM. “Normally, there is always someone at the airport counter, but there was no one.”

Assis didn’t realize his mistake until 10:41 a.m.—and by then, it was too late. He was refused entry, even after arguing with an airline worker to let him through.

“He saved my life. He did his job,” Assis told TV Globo.

Voepass Flight 2283 crashed into a residential area on Friday, killing all 62 people on board, and damaging many homes. Videos of the crash circulating on social media show the plane plummeting to the ground and bursting into flames.

Later on Friday the airline that operated the flight said in a statement that “there is still no confirmation of how the accident occurred or the current situation of the people on board.”

Assis wasn’t the only person to miss the doomed flight. “Thank God, we didn’t get on that plane. We didn’t know it was going to be with that company [Voepass], we thought it was going to be with LATAM, and LATAM was closed. I even arrived early [at the airport] and waited, waited and nothing,” another passenger who made the same mistake as Assis said in a televised interview with TV Globo.

He added that several other would-be passengers had also been waiting at the wrong counter, which led to them missing their flight.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has since offered his condolences to the families of the victims in a statement posted to X.

“I must be the bearer of very bad news, and I wanted all to stand up so we can take one minute of silence because a plane just fell in the town of Vinhedos in Sao Paulo with 58 passengers and 4 crew members and it seems that all of them passed,” he said. “So I’d like to ask for a minute of silence for the victims.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.