The images of the are impressive.plane crashed in brazil Friday August 9, 2024. None of the 62 people who were on board (58 passengers and 4 staff members) of the flight 2283 she survived.
The plane, a ATR 72-500 of the airline Voepass Air Lineshad taken off at 11:56 local time (14:56 in Italy) from Cascavel, in the southern state of Paraná, and was headed to Guarulhos airport, near São Paulo, but never reached its destination, crashing in the city of Vinhedo. According to the tracking site Flightradar24, the last air signal received was shortly after 13:20, a few minutes before the scheduled landing in Guarulhos, then the crash.
From the videos that have emerged in the last few hours on social media, you can clearly see how the aircraft rapidly descends vertically, then crashes to the ground and raises a thick cloud of black smoke. At the crash site, flames erupted in a matter of seconds, engulfing the debris.
The accident dynamics: data on the loss of altitude and the “flat spin”
According to the portal data FlightRadar24two minutes before the crash the plane was at an altitude of 5242 meters, one minute later at 1200 meters: it lost about 4 kilometers of altitude in less than 2 minutes and then crashed to the ground. As can be seen from the sudden reversal of the trajectory just before crashing, the pilot had tried at all costs to make a maneuver to avoid falling into residential areasalthough the plane hit a residential area, Recanto Florido on João Edueta Street. Incredibly, none of the residents died.
FlightRadar24 also reports the graph of the aircraft’s altitude and speed above the ground:
In 30 seconds the plane dropped 1800 meters in “flat spin“, which in aeronautical jargon indicates a condition in which the wings are parallel to the ground and the rotation is more horizontal than vertical. The videos circulating on the web clearly demonstrate how the aircraft descended following a spiral movement, without responding to the pilots’ commands, who had an extremely short amount of time to maneuver.
The fire that broke out when the plane hit the ground erupted in a matter of moments, but firefighters quickly brought it under control, preventing a much worse carnage.
What Happened to the Plane That Crashed in Brazil: The Stalemate Hypothesis
Many aviation experts interviewed by the Brazilian press have speculated that the most likely cause of the disaster is that the plane entered a stall. This is a phenomenon in which the wings completely lose their useful lift, causing the aircraft to crash.
Simply put, a stall occurs when an aircraft proceeds at a not enough speed to sustain flight. The thrust that an airplane receives upwards, in fact, increases with its speed: if this decreases, the thrust at a certain point is no longer able to compensate for the weight of the aircraft and it crashes.
The hypothesis is still to be ascertained, but at the moment it is the most accredited, given the time at which the plane should have arrived at its destination: the accident occurred when it was already in landing phasein which the aircraft slows down and consequently the stall phenomenon is more likely to occur.
Ice at high altitude may have caused the stall
Brazil’s civil aviation agency said the plane, of European manufacture (Airbus-Leonardo), was built in 2010 and was in good operating condition before taking off, with valid registration and airworthiness certificates.
The problem therefore does not appear to be attributable to the aircraft itself, but to the ice formation at high altitudewhich is very dangerous because it can weigh down the vehicle and disable some systems. In fact, in the area of the crash there was an active “severe icing” weather warning between 3650 metres and 6400 metres above sea level (remember that in Brazil it is now the middle of winter), and according to the flight tracks at that moment the aircraft was at around 5000 metres travelling at a speed of around 240 km/h before losing altitude.
The recovery of the black boxes and the investigations
In a press conference the airline admitted that the ATR 72 was “sensitive” to freezing temperatures but assured that the antifreeze system was fully functional according to the last check carried out on Thursday, a few hours before departure.
The Brazilian Air Force immediately sent a team of aircraft accident investigators to the scene to carry out the first technical surveys. The plane had two black boxescrash-proof flight data storage devices that have now been recovered and taken to two laboratories for analysis.
As stated by Eduardo BuschCEO of Voepass, there is a possibility that due to the serious impact the recorders may have been severely damagedmaking access to the data impossible, but there is still hope.
The airline said it will work closely with CENIPA (Air Accident Investigation and Prevention Center) to shed light on the exact causes of the crash.
ATR 72: A History of Crashes
Unfortunately, the ATR 72 is no stranger to accidents.
The first accident occurred on October 31, 1994: American Eagle Flight 4184 crashed in Roselawn, Indiana, killing all passengers and crew on board. The cause? A large accumulation of ice on the surface of the aircraft that made it difficult to control.
Since then, other accidents have occurred (a dozen), and one of the most well-known is undoubtedly that of the Bari-Djerba flightwhich crashed in 2005 off the coast of Palermo. The vessel had run out of fuel due to a faulty fuel gauge, and was fatal to 16 of the 38 passengers.
