UPDATE: August 10, 2024, at 7:30 a.m. ET
"The company regrets to inform that all 62 people on board flight 2283 died at the scene," Voepass confirmed in a statement to CNN, adding that the plane was carrying 58 passengers and four crew members.
The airline also stated that all onboard had Brazilian travel documents.
The cause of the crash remains a mystery but is now under investigation.
"The entire crew was competent," Voepass CEO Eduardo Busch said during a press conference. "We are waiting for access to all communications between the pilot and the control tower to have a broader understanding of what happened."
Original Text
A devastating
plane crash occurred on Friday in Brazil’s state of São Paulo and it looks as
though the accident claimed the lives of all 62 people on board. The aircraft
was operated by Brazilian carrier Voepass.
In the midst of a
speech at a naval event, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva broke
the news to the crowd as he stopped asking for a moment of silence to honor the
victims. While the number of fatalities has not yet been officially declared, the
president announced, "it appears they all died.”
In a statement,
Voepass wrote, “There is still no confirmation of how the accident occurred or
the current situation of the people on board.”
There were 58
passengers and four crew members aboard the ill-fated flight when the plane
went down. According to CNN,
the Voepass plane was en route from Cascavel to São Paulo-Guarulhos
International Airport when its signal was lost just before 1:30 p.m. local time.
Social media videos
caught the aircraft in a spiral free-fall out of the sky before it crashed down
into a residential area of Vinhedo as residents looked on in horror. Other
amateur footage of the crash site showed the demolished plane completely engulfed
in flames.
The Associated
Press reported that firefighters, military police and Brazil’s civil
defense authority all dispatched teams to cordon off the area and begin the
process of cleaning up the crash site.
The country’s
Civil Defense confirmed that the plane flattened multiple houses in a
residential neighborhood when it struck, though it wasn’t immediately clear if
anyone on the ground was killed or injured in the incident.
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