By Sebastian Rocandio
VINHEDO, Brazil (Reuters) – Brazilian authorities were working on Saturday to recover the remains of passengers from a plane that crashed in the town of Vinhedo near Sao Paulo on Friday, killing all 62 people on board.
As of 1 p.m. local time (1600 GMT) on Saturday, at least 31 bodies had been recovered, the Sao Paulo state government said. The bodies of the pilot and co-pilot have been identified, said Dario Pacheco, mayor of Vinhedo.
All the bodies are being transferred to the Sao Paulo police morgue.
The dead include a Venezuelan man and a Portuguese woman, state civil defense official Roberto Farina said, adding that local consulates had already been contacted.
On Friday, regional airline Voepass said the plane was carrying 57 passengers and four crew, but on Saturday the company confirmed there was another unaccounted for passenger on the flight, raising the death toll to 62.
Authorities are using seating assignments, physical characteristics, documents and belongings such as cellphones to identify the victims, firefighter Maycon Cristo said at the scene.
“Once all this evidence has been collected, we will remove the victims from the rubble and place them in the vehicle to be transported to Sao Paulo,” he said.
Relatives of the victims were flown to Sao Paulo to provide DNA samples to help identify the remains, said state civil defense coordinator Henguel Pereira.
The plane's so-called “black box,” which contains voice recordings and flight data, is being analyzed, Marcelo Moreno, head of Brazil's aviation accident investigation center Cenipa, said at a news conference in Vinhedo.
The plane, an ATR-72 turboprop, was heading to Sao Paulo from Cascavel in Paraná state and crashed at around 1:30 p.m. (1630 GMT) in Vinhedo, about 80 kilometers northwest of Sao Paulo. Despite the crash in a residential area, there were no injuries on the ground.
The aircraft was flying normally until 1:21 p.m., when it stopped responding to calls, and radar contact was lost at 1:22 p.m., the Brazilian Air Force said in a statement.
The pilots did not report any emergencies or adverse weather conditions, the air force added.
Franco-Italian ATR, jointly owned by Airbus and Leonardo, is the largest producer of regional turboprop aircraft with seating for 40 to 70 people. ATR told Reuters on Friday that its specialists were “fully engaged” in the investigation into the accident.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;n.queue=();t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)(0);s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,’https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
