A passenger plane with 61 people aboard crashed in a residential area of a city in Brazil’s São Paulo state Friday, the airline said, with local officials reporting that everyone on board the plane had been killed.
The airline, VoePass, said that the ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop was headed for São Paulo’s international airport Guarulhos with 57 passengers and four crew members aboard when it crashed in Vinhedo, about 80 kilometres northwest of Brazil’s largest city.
A prior statement had said there were 58 passengers.
City officials at Valinhos, near Vinhedo, said there were no survivors. Only one home in the local condominium complex had been damaged, while none of the residents were hurt.
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.
Area sealed off by authorities
Firefighters, military police and the civil defence 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.
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, spiralling as it fell.
The Capela neighbourhood where the plane crashed sits in a district far from the centre of the prosperous city that’s home to 77,000 residents.
The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.
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