Brazilian authorities probe cause of plane crash that left 61 dead

Brazilian authorities are investigating the cause of a plane crash in Sao Paulo state that killed all 61 people on board.

Local airline Voepass’ plane, an ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop, was headed for Sao Paulo’s international airport in Guarulhos with 57 passengers and four crew members when it went down in the city of Vinhedo on Friday.

Images recorded by witnesses showed the aircraft in a flat spin and plunging vertically before smashing to the ground inside a gated community, and leaving an obliterated fuselage consumed by fire.

Residents said there were no injuries on the ground.

Rain fell on rescue workers as they recovered the first bodies from the scene in the chill of the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

It was the world’s 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 was also an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error.

A report from Brazilian television network Globo’s meteorological centre said it “confirmed the possibility of the formation of ice in the region of Vinhedo”, and local media cited experts pointed to icing as a potential cause for the crash.

An American Eagle ATR 72-200 crashed on October 31 1994, and the United States National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause was ice build-up while the plane was circling in a holding pattern.

The plane rolled at about 8,000 feet and dove into the ground, killing all 68 people on board. The US Federal Aviation Administration issued operating procedures for ATRs and similar planes, telling pilots not to use the autopilot in icing conditions.

But Brazilian aviation expert Lito Sousa cautioned that meteorological conditions alone might not be enough to explain why the plane fell in the manner that it did on Friday.

He said: “Analysing an air crash just with images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes.

“But we can see a plane with loss of support, no horizontal speed. In this flat spin condition, there’s no way to reclaim control of the plane.”

Sao Paulo public security secretary Guilherme Derrite said the plane’s black box had been recovered, apparently in a preserved state.

Marcelo Moura, director of operations for Voepass, told reporters Friday night that, while there were forecasts for ice, they were within acceptable levels for the aircraft.

Brazil’s federal police began its own investigation, and dispatched specialists in plane crashes and the identification of disaster victims, it said in a statement.

French-Italian plane manufacturer ATR said in a statement that it had been informed that the accident involved its ATR 72-500 model, and that 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 SpA.

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.