VINHEDO, Brazil — A plane with 62 people on board crashed on Friday in a fire in a residential area of a city in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, the airline said, but it was not immediately clear how many people were injured or killed.
The airline VOEPASS confirmed in a statement that a plane heading to Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport crashed inside a gated community in the city of Vinhedo with 58 passengers and 4 crew members on board. The statement did not 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 it appeared that all passengers and crew on board had died, without elaborating on how that information had been obtained.
Firefighters, military police and civil defense authorities sent teams to the accident site in Vinhedo. Authorities sealed off the entrance to the residential area where the plane crashed, while journalists outside watched as official vehicles, including ambulances, drove in and waited for updates.
“I thought it was going to fall in our garden,” a resident and witness who only gave her name as Ana Lucía told reporters near the accident site. “It was terrifying, but thank God there were no casualties among the locals. However, it appears that the 62 people who were inside the plane were the real victims.”
Video obtained by The Associated Press from a bystander and verified shows at least two bodies strewn across the burning rubble.
Brazilian television station GloboNews showed aerial images of an area with smoke billowing from the fuselage of a destroyed plane. Additional footage on GloboNews earlier showed the plane sliding downward vertically, spiraling as it fell.
The Brazilian Air Force’s air accident investigation and prevention center said in a statement that it has a team on its way to the crash site. In a separate statement, Brazil’s Federal Police said it had already begun its investigation and was sending specialists in air crashes and disaster victim identification to help.
VOEPASS staff at Guarulhos airport told the AP that the company is notifying the victims’ families and supporting them in a private room at the airport, but did not specify how many victims.
The plane is an ATR 72-500 twin-engine turboprop, according to FlightRadar24, a flight tracking website, although VOEPASS did not immediately confirm this.
The manufacturer of that plane, the Franco-Italian ATR, said in a statement that it had been informed that the accident involved that model of plane and said that the company’s specialists 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 of Airbus in France and Leonardo SpA of Italy. Crashes involving various models of the ATR 72 have caused 470 deaths since the 1990s, according to an Aviation Safety Network database.
The Capela neighborhood where the plane crashed is in a district far from the center of the prosperous city that is home to 77,000 residents.
The plane departed from Cascavel, in the state of Paraná.
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AP video journalist Tatiana Pollastri contributed from Vinhedo
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