Families of victims of an airliner crash in Brazil have arrived at a morgue and are working with forensics experts to identify the remains of the 62 people killed in the accident.
Local authorities said the bodies of the pilot, Danilo Santos Romano, and his co-pilot, Humberto de Campos Alencar e Silva, were the first to be identified by experts.
The Sao Paulo state government said in a statement on Saturday evening that the remains of all the victims had been recovered. There were 34 male and 28 female bodies in the wreckage, it said.
The ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop operated by Brazilian airline Voepass was headed for Guarulhos international airport in Sao Paulo with 58 passengers and four crew members when it went down Friday in Vinhedo, 78 kilometres north of the metropolis.
Three-year-old Liz Ibba dos Santos, who was travelling with her father, was the only child known to be on the passenger list. The remains of Luna, a dog that was travelling with a Venezuelan family, was found in the wreckage.
Sao Paulo’s morgue began receiving the bodies on Friday evening, and it asked victims’ relatives to bring in medical, X-ray and dental records to help identify the victims. Blood tests were also done to help identification efforts.
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.
Metsul, one of Brazil’s most respected meteorological companies, said on Friday there were reports of severe icing in Sao Paulo state around the time of the crash. Local media cited experts pointing to icing as a potential cause for the accident.
Police restricted access to the main entrance of the Sao Paulo morgue where bodies from the crash were being identified. Some family members of the victims arrived on foot, others came in minivans. None spoke to journalists, and authorities requested that they not be filmed as they came.
Brazilian aviation expert Lito Sousa cautioned that meteorological conditions alone might not be enough to explain why the Voepass plane fell in the manner it did Friday.
“Analysing an air crash just with images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes,” Sousa told The Associated Press by phone. “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.”
Brazil’s air force said on Saturday that both of the plane’s flight recorders had been sent to its analysis laboratory in the capital, Brasilia. The results of its investigations are expected to be published within 30 days, it said.
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.
In an earlier statement, the Brazilian air force’s centre for the investigation and prevention of air accidents said the plane’s pilots did not call for help or say they were operating under adverse weather conditions.
The ATR 72, which is built by a joint venture of Airbus in France and Italy’s Leonardo SpA. is generally used on shorter flights. 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.
