Brazilian civil defence teams worked through the night removing the remains of passengers on a plane that crashed on Friday near Sao Paulo, killing all 62 people on board.
At least 21 bodies had been recovered by Saturday morning, Sao Paulo state government said, with two victims identified on site. All the bodies are being moved to Sao Paulo’s police morgue.
On Friday regional carrier Voepass said the plane was carrying 57 passengers and four crew, but on Saturday the firm confirmed another unaccounted-for passenger was on the flight, putting the number of casualties at 62.
The position of the bodies on the crashed plane, physical characteristics, documents and belongings such as mobile phones were being used to aid in identification, firefighter Maycon Cristo said at the crash site.
“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 said.
Relatives of the victims have been brought to Sao Paulo to help provide genetic material for DNA identification of body parts and other information on the dead, said Sao Paulo state government civil defence co-ordinator Henguel Pereira.
The plane, an ATR-72 turboprop, was bound for Sao Paulo from Cascavel, in the state of Parana, and crashed at about 1:30pm (16.30 GMT) in the town of Vinhedo, some 80km northwest of Sao Paulo.
Franco-Italian ATR, jointly owned by Airbus and Leonardo, is the dominant producer of regional turboprop planes seating 40 to 70 people. ATR said on Friday that its specialists were “fully engaged” with the investigation into the crash.
The removal of bodies comes as Brazilian authorities investigate the cause of the plane crash.
Images recorded by witnesses showed the aircraft in a flat spin and plunging vertically before smashing to the ground inside a gated community, and leaving an obliterated fuselage consumed by fire. Residents said there were no injuries on the ground.
Rain fell on rescue workers as they recovered the first bodies from the scene in the chill of the southern hemisphere’s winter.
It was the world’s deadliest airline crash since January 2023, when 72 people died on board a Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal that stalled and crashed while making its landing approach. That plane was also an ATR 72, and the final report blamed pilot error.
A report from Brazilian television network Globo’s meteorological centre said it “confirmed the possibility of the formation of ice in the region of Vinhedo”, and local media cited experts pointed to icing as a potential cause for the crash.
An American Eagle ATR 72-200 crashed on October 31st, 1994, and the United States National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause was ice build-up while the plane was circling in a holding pattern.
The plane rolled at about 8,000ft and dove into the ground, killing all 68 people on board. The US Federal Aviation Administration issued operating procedures for ATRs and similar planes, telling pilots not to use the autopilot in icing conditions.
But Brazilian aviation expert Lito Sousa cautioned that meteorological conditions alone might not be enough to explain why the plane fell in the manner that it did on Friday.
He said: “Analysing an air crash just with images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes.
“But we can see a plane with loss of support, no horizontal speed. In this flat spin condition, there’s no way to reclaim control of the plane.”
Sao Paulo public security secretary Guilherme Derrite said the plane’s black box had been recovered, apparently in a preserved state.
Marcelo Moura, director of operations for Voepass, told reporters Friday night that, while there were forecasts for ice, they were within acceptable levels for the aircraft.
Brazil’s Federal Police began its own investigation, and dispatched specialists in plane crashes and the identification of disaster victims, it said in a statement.
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. – Reuters/AP