Brazilian authorities began to remove the bodies on Saturday of the 62 victims of the plane crash in the interior of the state of São Paulo and carried out the tests on site to determine the possible causes of its impressive nosedive.
The plane crashed on Friday on a residential area of the town of Vinhedoabout 80 km northwest of the city of Sao Paulo.
According to the mayor of Vinhedo, 24 bodies have already been removed from the mass of metal into which the fuselage of the plane was converted, which caught fire after the impact.
Los remains were “charred” And so far only “two have been identified: the pilot and the co-pilot,” Mayor Darío Pacheco told reporters.
Some 200 personnel are working on the tasks. AFP confirmed the coming and going of police patrols, ambulances and fire trucks from the Recanto Florido Residential Complex, a condominium houses nestled in a peaceful wooded settingwhere the plane crashed.
The persistent rain that has fallen since Friday night adds difficulty to the work. It is about a difficult task that can take “even days”“, firefighters spokesman at the scene, Captain Maycon Cristo, told AFP.
Despite hitting the patio of a house, No neighbors were injured.
“It was a feeling of panic, of helplessness (…) it was really very, very sad”Roberta Henrique, 38, president of the residential association, told AFP. Residents are “scared, psychologically beaten”she added, moved.
Spectacular collapse
Voepassthe airline that operated the flight, raised the number of victims to 62 again on Saturday, after verifying the passenger list. They were all of Brazilian nationality, according to the airline.
The aircraft of the Franco-Italian manufacturer ATR I was traveling from Cascavel, in the state of Paraná (south), at Guarulhos international airport, in Sao Paulo.
Images from Friday showed a large plane plummeting at high speed.
According to flight tracking site Flight Radar 24, the The plane flew for almost an hour at 17 thousand feet (5,180 meters) until at 13:21 locales (16:21 GMT) began to lose altitude and in just a minute had a sharp fall to 4,100 feet (1,250 meters).
The Brazilian Air Force reported that the Aircraft lost contact with radar at 13:22 local time and that the crew at no time “declared an emergency or were under adverse weather conditions.”
The Brazilian Aeronautical Accident Prevention and Investigation Center (Cenipa) opened an investigation to determine the causes of the accident.
Cenipa investigators recovered the black box with the flight records on Friday for analysis, authorities said. The president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared three days of mourning in the country.
Icing?
Neighbors in the neighborhood where the accident occurred described feeling a loud noise and then they saw the plane plummeting in free fall.
It then burst into flames and released a huge plume of smoke, according to videos filmed by locals.
According to the National Civil Aviation Agency, the aircraft, which had been flying since 2010, complied with all current regulations and the crew had all valid certificates.
Voepass operations director Marcel Moura said that the night before the accident the plane had undergone “routine maintenance” and did not present “any type of technical problem.”
Specialists pointed to the hypothesis that a Ice formation on aircraft wings would have caused the accident.
Moura admitted that this model from the ATR manufacturer flies “in a zone where it has a greater sensitivity to ice” and that the Friday’s weather conditions predicted the presence of that elementBut “within acceptable flight characteristics,” Moura said.
The manufacturer ATR said in a statement that its specialists “are fully committed to supporting ongoing research.”
This is the first major air tragedy on Brazilian soil in 17 years.
In 2007, an Airbus A320 of the Brazilian airline TAM failed to land at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport and crashed with 187 people on board. The accident left 199 muertosincluding 12 people who were working on the runway.
In 2009, an Airbus A-330 from Air France disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean upon entering a zone of turbulence after taking off from Rio de Janeiro bound for Paris with 228 people on boardThere were no survivors.
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