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 in a social media post on Friday. The airline said there were no survivors and that all 57 passengers and 4 crew members died at the scene.
The airline VOEPASS had previously said there were 62 people aboard. It confirmed in an earlier statement that the plane, headed for Sao Paulo's international airport Guarulhos, crashed inside a gated community in the city of Vinhedo. The plane took off from Cascavel Airport at 11:46 a.m. local time, the airline said.
The statement didn't say what caused the accident.
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.
"Very sad," he wrote on social media. "All my solidarity to the families and friends of the victims."
Firefighters, military police and the civil defense authority dispatched teams to the crash site in Vinhedo, the government said in a statement.
Authorities sealed off the entrance to the residential area where the plane went down, as journalists outside watched as official vehicles including ambulances drove in and waited for updates.
"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. It seems that the 62 people inside the plane were the real victims, though." (An earlier statement from the airline said 58 passengers and 4 crew members were on board.)
Video obtained by The Associated Press from a bystander 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 vertically, spiraling as it fell.
The Brazilian air force's center for the investigation and prevention of air accidents said in a statement it has a team en route to the crash site. In a separate statement, Brazil's Federal Police said it already had begun its investigation, and is dispatching 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, but didn't specify how many victims.
The plane is an ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop, according to Flight tracker FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, though VOEPASS didn't immediately confirm that.
FlightRadar24 said in a social media post that in the area where the plane crashed, there was an "active warning for severe icing" between 12,000 feet and 21,000 feet. FlightRadar24 said the aircraft was flying at an altitude of 17,000 feet just before the crash.
That plane's manufacturer, French-Italian ATR, said in a statement that it had been informed that the accident involved that model of plane, 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 sits in a district far from the center of the prosperous city that's home to 77,000 residents.
The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Parana.
The crash comes less than a year after 12 people, including a baby, died in a plane crash in the Brazilian Amazon.
"Not a normal movement for a plane"
Nathalie Cicari, who lives near the crash site, told CNN Brasil the impact was "terrifying."
"I was having lunch, I heard a very loud noise very close by," she said, describing the sound as drone-like but "much louder."
"I went out on the balcony and saw the plane spinning. Within seconds, I realized that it was not a normal movement for a plane," she told the broadcaster.
Cicari was not hurt but had to evacuate her house, which was filled with black smoke from the crash.
Teams of firefighters, military police and state civil defense were deployed in the Capela neighborhood, in Vinhedo.
The doomed plane recorded its first flight in April 2010, according to the website planespotters.net.
AFP contributed to this report.
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