bove the small city of Vinhedo, Brazil, on Friday, a passenger plane was falling from the sky. Residents began filming.
Those videos show the horrifying moment when an 89-foot-long plane, carrying 61 people and slowly spinning in circles, plummeted to Earth. A moment after the plane disappears from view near a gated community, an enormous black plume of smoke rises.
One video then shows a house on fire, a swimming pool full of debris, and a group of men peering over a scene of carnage in a yard: a shredded fuselage, twisted metal, and, several yards in front of the cockpit, a body.
VoePass Flight 2283 crashed Friday toward the end of a scheduled two-hour flight from Cascavel, Brazil, to Sao Paulo. VoePass, a small Brazilian airline, said all 57 passengers and four crew members died in the accident.
The airline and Brazilian officials said they did not know why the plane had crashed.
The airline said that all the plane's systems, an ATR 72, were operating correctly when it took off. The pilots did not signal any emergency, officials said. The aircraft, a twin-engine turboprop plane, was built in 2010 and was in compliance with Brazilian regulations, they added.
The plane crashed in a grassy area in a residential community, but it did not land on any residences, and no one on the ground was injured, officials said.
“It fell next to a house, on a lot,” Vinhedo Mayor Dario Pacheco told Brazilian news channel Globo. “Just next to it, the resident said he woke up to a noise and left running, and that all the people around also left, fearing an explosion.”
Globo, Brazil’s main television network, interrupted Olympics coverage to broadcast aerial images that showed firefighters spraying a smoking gash in the ground, next to the mangled remains of a plane. Two buildings, which appeared to be residences, were only feet away.
In the final minute of the flight, the plane’s transponder reported that it was falling between 8,000 and 24,000 feet per minute, according to FlightRadar24, a provider of flight data. The plane had been flying at 17,000 feet just before it dropped from the sky, the company said.
VoePass used the same plane to fly from Sao Paulo to Cascavel earlier Friday, according to FlightRadar24 data.
FlightRadar24 said that in the area where the plane lost control, there was an active warning for severe icing. The formation of ice on a plane during flight can be a dangerous scenario, making an aircraft heavier and reducing its lift. Most aircraft have anti-icing systems designed to prevent or reduce the formation of ice.
VoePass, formerly known as Passaredo, is a small Brazilian airline that operates a fleet of 15 ATR aircraft to serve midsize cities around Brazil. It transported about 500,000 passengers last year, representing just less than 0.5% of the Brazilian market.
ATR is a joint venture of two European aerospace manufacturers, Airbus and Leonardo. There are more than 800 ATR aircraft flying around the world, accounting for just under 3% of the active global fleet of passenger planes, according to Cirium, an aviation data company. The aircraft are most popular in Asia and Europe, although Brazil is a leading operator of ATR planes.
ATR said in a statement that it would cooperate with investigators looking into the accident.
Icy conditions have contributed to crashes of other turboprop planes in the past, including older generations of ATR 72 aircraft.
In 1994, an ATR 72 operated by American Eagle crashed in Indiana, killing all 68 people on board. A federal investigation faulted the company for not disclosing enough about the plane’s vulnerability to ice, leading ATR to add more ice-removing equipment to the aircraft.
But aviation safety experts regularly warn against concluding such episodes before investigations have concluded. Airplane crashes are complex and almost always are the result of multiple points of failure. And early suspicions about the causes of crashes often prove incorrect.
“The investigation is very premature,” Marcelo Moreno, Brazil’s chief plane crash investigator, told reporters, batting away questions about icing. “Anything we might speculate at this moment, which may eventually be confirmed in the future, is still very premature.”
Lito Sousa, a Brazilian aviation expert, said it’s too soon to conclude but icing may have been a factor. “There is no accident or an air crash that is caused by a sole factor,” he said. “We need a chain of events for something bad to happen. So in that case, ice may have played a role.” He added that although ATR aircraft had been prone to icing problems in the past, the manufacturer has worked to combat the problem.
Many residents of Vinhedo, a city of 80,000 people an hour’s drive from Sao Paulo, said they heard the loud rumbling of the plane as it fell from the sky.
João Matos, 45, said he was arriving home, close to the crash site, when he heard the plane falling. “I saw it coming down, rotating like a screw,” he said. “It was about 100 meters away, and that’s when it fell near my neighbor’s house, on its belly and exploded.” He said he grabbed his son and ran.
Helen Erlemann, a 19-year-old student who lives close to the crash site, said she was in her bedroom when she heard a loud crash. “I looked out the other window,” she said. “And I saw a ton of smoke rising.”
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, at an event Friday, asked for a minute of silence for the victims. “We just have to mourn and care for the families, care for the people who are now going to be very nervous,” he told reporters later. “Lots of sadness in the air.”
In Cascavel, where the plane took off, a few people were coping with shock and relief. Adriano Assis told Globo he had a ticket for Flight 2283, but the gate agent would not let him board because he arrived at the gate too late.
“I fought. I put a little pressure on her. I said, ‘Miss, put me on this plane. I have to go. I have to go,’” he said, still at the airport. When he later learned that plane had crashed, “I thanked God,” he said. “I’m shaking.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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