62 killed as plane crashes in Brazil, officials say. Video shows aircraft plummeting.

A regional plane carrying at least 62 people crashed Friday in a residential neighborhood in Brazil, killing all on board, officials in the South American country announced, as emergency crews blanketed the area.

At a briefing Friday afternoon, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, “I have to be the bearer of really bad news,” and called for a minute of silence to honor the 58 passengers and four crew members aboard the plane that crashed in Vinhedo, a city northwest of São Paulo. The cause of the crash was unknown, he said.

“It appears all have died,” Lula said.

In a social media post, Voepass, a regional airline based in São Paulo state, confirmed its plane, flight 2283, had crashed. The plane departed from Cascavel, a Brazilian city near the country’s southern border with Paraguay and Argentina, and was headed to São Paulo’s main airport, in Guarulhos, Voepass said in its post.

FlightAware data indicates the plane, a twin-engine turboprop ATR-72, departed at 11:50 a.m. local time and was scheduled to land just before 2 p.m.

The airline said it hadn’t confirmed how the crash occurred or the status of the people on board.

The government of São Paulo state said on social media that civil defense and public security officials mobilized in Vinhedo’s Capela neighborhood to respond to the plane crash. Firefighters were called at around 1 p.m. local time and seven teams were immediately sent to the scene, the government’s post said.

A video shared by the site BNO news showed a plane, identified as Voepass Flight 2283, spinning out of control as it plunged behind a cluster of trees near houses, followed by a large plume of black smoke.

Footage posted on the news showed the plane broken into pieces and still aflame, between red tile roofs and trees, in the Vinhedo neighborhood, about 50 miles northwest of São Paulo.

Prior airplane crashes in Brazil

According to the Aviation Safety Network, three of the deadliest airplane crashes in South America have occurred in Brazil. The network is a service of the Flight Safety Foundation, an international nonprofit focused on aviation safety research and advocacy.

On July 17, 2007, all 187 people aboard a commercial plane died in a runway excursion at the São Paulo-Congonhas Airport. Twelve people on the ground were also killed in that crash, which sparked a fire that took hours to extinguish, according to a report by Brazil’s Aeronautical Accident Investigation and Prevention Center.

Less than a year earlier, a domestic passenger flight and business jet collided mid-air, the Aviation Safety Network said. All 154 people aboard the Boeing 737 died, while the seven jet passengers survived.

And in the summer of 1982, in what the Aviation Safety Network said was the second worst accident that year, an airplane captain inadvertently descended far below 5,000 feet while he was distracted by bright city lights of Fortaleza, despite two altitude alerts and the co-pilot’s warning of mountains ahead, according to the network. The flight he was piloting struck a wooded mountainside at 1,950 feet. All 137 people aboard died.