Civil defense teams are working to recover the bodies of 58 passengers and four crew members killed in a fire accident in the state of São Paulo.
Brazilian authorities are working to determine what caused a plane to crash in the state of São Paulo, killing all 62 people on board in one of the worst aviation incidents in the South American country’s history.
Civil defense teams worked through the night until Saturday to recover the remains of passengers and crew killed when the Voepass airline flight crashed into a fiery inferno near the city of Vinhedo.
At least 21 bodies had been recovered from the site as of Saturday morning, with two victims identified at the scene, the São Paulo state government said. All bodies are being transferred to the São Paulo police morgue.
The plane from local airline Voepass, a twin-engine turboprop ATR 72, was heading to São Paulo international airport with 58 passengers and four crew when it crashed on Friday.
The airline revised the initial death toll to 61, but on Saturday raised it to 62 after finding a passenger who was not on the original list of names.
“The person is a passenger who was not on the list of names released last night because, for technical reasons, his identity was not confirmed,” reported Monica Yanakiew, from Al Jazeera, from São Paulo.
The position of the bodies on the crashed plane, physical characteristics, documents and belongings such as cellphones were being used to aid identification, firefighter Maycon Cristo said at the crash site on Saturday.
“Once all this evidence has been collected, we will remove the victims from the wreckage and place them in the vehicle to be transported to São Paulo,” he added.
Relatives of the victims also traveled to São Paulo to help provide genetic material for DNA identification of body parts and other information about the dead, said Henguel Pereira, civil defense coordinator for the São Paulo state government.
As recovery efforts continue, questions are emerging about the cause of the accident.
A report published Friday by Brazilian television network Globo’s meteorological center said it “confirmed the possibility of ice formation in the Vinhedo region,” and local media cited experts pointing to ice formation as a potential cause.
Lt. Col. Carlos Henrique Baldi of the Brazilian Air Force’s air accident investigation and prevention center told reporters at a news conference on Friday that it was still too early to confirm whether ice caused the crash.
The plane is “certified in several countries to fly in severe icing conditions, including in countries, unlike ours, where the impact of icing is more significant,” said Baldi, who heads the center’s research division.
Brazilian aviation expert Lito Sousa also warned that weather conditions alone may not be enough to explain why the plane crashed the way it did.
“Analyzing a plane crash with just images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes,” Sousa told The Associated Press by phone.
“But we can see a plane with loss of support, without horizontal speed. In this flat rotation condition, there is no way to regain control of the airplane.”
Speaking to reporters on Friday in Vinhedo, São Paulo’s Public Security Secretary, Guilherme Derrite, said the plane’s black box had been recovered, apparently in a preserved state.
Meanwhile, French-Italian aircraft manufacturer ATR said in a statement that it was informed that the accident involved its ATR 72-500 model and that the company’s experts are “fully committed to supporting both the investigation and the customer.”
The ATR 72 is generally used on shorter flights. The planes are built by a joint venture between France’s Airbus and Italy’s Leonardo SpA.
Friday’s crash is the deadliest in Brazil since 199 people died in 2007 on a flight operated by TAM, which later joined LAN to become what is now LATAM Airlines.
It is also the world’s deadliest accident since January 2023, when 72 people died when a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal stalled and crashed on approach to land. That plane was also an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
