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, with local officials reporting that everyone on board the plane had been 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.
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.