A plane crashed in Brazil on Friday, killing all 62 passengers, including the pilot, on board.
About one hour and 30 minutes after Voepass Flight 2283 departed from Cascavel, Brazil, the ATR-72-500 turboprop plane rapidly descended from 17,000 feet, crashing in a residential area. Video showed the fiery wreckage had hit a house in Vinhedo and largely disintegrated.
Video posted on social media showed the plane caught in a flat spin while tumbling to the ground, its engines still audibly active.
Brazil’s Civil Defense said the plane crashed into multiple houses, but Valinhos City Communications Director Ana Cândida Briski told CNN that no residents were killed.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared three days of mourning over the tragedy.
The U.S. Embassy expressed solidarity with the victims of the crash.
“We express our solidarity with the families of the victims of the Voepass flight that crashed in Vinhedo, in the state of São Paulo,” it said in a post on X. “We regret this tragic accident!”
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The cause of the crash is currently unknown, though aviation experts have floated several theories. Franco Rinaldi, a commercial aviation specialist and consultant in Argentina, told the Wall Street Journal that a likely culprit was ice, possibly causing the plane to lose velocity and stall.
“If the plane spins and starts to fall like that, it’s because it lost the speed that kept it in the air,” he said, adding that the spinning fall seen in videos was “very strange.”
