Plane crashes in Brazil's Sao Paulo state, all 61 on board killed

A plane with 61 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.

A regional turboprop plane crashed near Sao Paulo in Brazil on Friday, killing all 61 people on board, the airline said.

Regional carrier Voepass said the plane, bound for Sao Paulo's international airport, took off from Cascavel, in the state of Parana, and crashed at around 1:30 p.m. (1630 GMT) in the town of Vinhedo, some 80 km (50 miles) northwest of Sao Paulo.

Video shared on social media showed the ATR-72 aircraft spinning out of control as it plunged down behind a cluster of trees near houses, followed by a large plume of black smoke.

Nearby resident Daniel de Lima said he heard a loud noise before looking outside his condominium in Vinhedo when he saw the plane in a horizontal spiral.

"It was rotating, but it wasn't moving forward," he told Reuters. "Soon after it fell out of the sky and exploded."

Police stand along the street leading to the gated community where a plane crashed in Sao Paulo state, Brazil, Friday, August 9, 2024 [Andre Penner/AP Photo]

City officials at Valinhos, near Vinhedo, said there were no survivors and only one home in the local condominium complex had been damaged while none of the residents were hurt.

"I almost believe the pilot tried to avoid a nearby neighborhood, which is densely populated," de Lima said.

Authorities did not immediately say what had caused the crash, though the head of Brazilian aviation accident investigation center Cenipa said that the plane's so-called "black box" containing voice recordings and flight data had been recovered from the site.

The video of the crash showed clear weather, with the forecast for the area calling for light rainfall and winds of 10 km per hour (6 mph).

John Hansman, a professor in the department of aeronautics and astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reviewed some of the footage shared on social media and without having reviewed flight data said the crash did not appear to have been caused by weather.

"It may have been an engine failure on one side that was mismanaged by the crew," he said. "It could be the thrust of the remaining engine that started the rotation downward."

The news outlet Globo shared images of the flaming wreckage of the plane in the state of Sao Paulo. The Associated Press reported that a video obtained from a bystander and verified by the news agency showed at least two bodies amidst the ruins of the plane.

“It just dropped out of the sky, fell on top of a house; luckily, there was nobody in the house,” Al Jazeera correspondent Monica Yanakiew reported from Rio de Janeiro. “But by the images we’ve been seeing, everyone is really likely to be dead, because the plane was totally destroyed.”

Yanakiew added that the incident is being described as the worst of its kind in modern Brazilian history.

Firefighters, military police, and the country’s civil defence authority have despatched workers to the site of the crash, which has been sealed off by authorities.

“The general director of the Federal Police, Andrei Passos, reported that an investigation and forensics team, with experts in identifying disaster victims,” Globo reported. The outlet also said Sao Paulo Governor Tarcisio de Freitas is travelling to the site of the crash.

The air traffic tracker Flightradar24 said in a social media post that the aircraft was an ATR72-500 built in 2010 and was en route to Sao Paulo from the Cascavel airport in the southern state of Parana.