Passenger plane carrying 61 people crashes outside São Paulo, Brazil, killing all on board

A passenger plane crashed into a gated residential community in Brazil's Sao Paulo state Friday, killing all 61 people aboard and leaving a smouldering wreck, officials and the airline said.

Officials gave no immediate word of any casualties at the site of the crash in the city of Vinhedo, about 80km northwest of Sao Paulo, but witnesses at the scene said there were no victims among residents of the neighbourhood.

The airline VOEPASS said that its plane, an ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop, was headed for Sao Paulo's international airport Guarulhos with 57 passengers and 4 crew members aboard when it crashed in Vinhedo.

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It provided a flight manifest with passenger names, but not their nationalities. A prior statement had said there were 58 passengers.

"The company regrets to inform that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died at the site," VOEPASS said in a statement.

"At this time, VOEPASS is prioritising provision of unrestricted assistance to the victims' families and effectively collaborating with authorities to determine the causes of the accident."

Flight tracking data shows that the Voepass Linhas Aéreas dropped 17,000 feet in just one minute, but it is not clear what caused the twin-engine turboprop plane to fall.

It was the deadliest airline crash since January 2023, when 72 people died on board a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal that stalled and crashed while making its landing approach.

That plane also was an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error.

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.

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The state's firefighters, military police and civil defence authority dispatched teams to the location.

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."

Video obtained from a witness by The Associated Press and verified shows at least two bodies strewn about flaming pieces of wreckage.

Brazilian television network GloboNews showed aerial footage of an area with smoke coming out of an obliterated plane fuselage.

Additional footage on GloboNews earlier showed the plane drifting downward in a flat spin.

Flight tracking website 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.

It began losing altitude a minute and a half before crashing. The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1.21pm, when it dropped about 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed about 400 feet in about eight seconds.

Eight seconds later, it lost just under 2000 feet. Then, in about one minute, it began rapidly descending — roughly 17,000 feet in just one minute.

The last data transmission from the plane was at 1.22pm.

The Brazilian air force's centre 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.

In a separate statement, Brazil's Federal Police said it already had begun its investigation, and had dispatched specialists in plane crashes and the identification of disaster victims to help.

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.

French-Italian plane manufacturer ATR said in a statement that it had been informed that the accident involved its ATR 72-500 model, 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. Crashes involving various models of the ATR 72 have resulted in 470 deaths going back to the 1990s, according to a database of the Aviation Safety Network.

The Capela neighborhood where the plane crashed on Friday sits in a district far from the centre of the prosperous city that's home to 77,000 residents.

It had departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.