Brazil authorities recovering bodies from plane crash that killed 62

Work was underway yesterday by Brazilian authorities in recovering the remains of passengers on a plane that crashed on Friday in the town of Vinhedo, near Sao Paulo, killing all 62 people on board.
At least 31 bodies had been recovered by 1pm local time (1600 GMT) yesterday, the Sao Paulo state government said.
The crash transformed the plane’s fuselage into a mass of twisted iron.
A steady overnight rain complicated the recovery efforts by some 200 workers, Vinhedo mayor Dario Pacheco told reporters.
With many victims badly burned, so far only “two bodies have been identified: the pilot and the co-pilot”, he said.
All the bodies are being moved to Sao Paulo’s police morgue.
A Venezuelan man and Portuguese woman are among the dead, state civil defence official Roberto Farina said, adding that the local consulates have already been contacted.
On Friday regional carrier Voepass said the plane was carrying 57 passengers and four crew, but yesterday the firm confirmed another unaccounted-for passenger was on the flight, putting the number of casualties at 62.
Authorities are using seat assignments, physical characteristics, documents and belongings such as cell phones to identify the victims, firefighter Maycon Cristo said at the crash site.
“Once all this evidence has been collected, we will remove the victims from the wreckage and place them in the vehicle to be transported to Sao Paulo,” he said.
Relatives of the victims have been brought to Sao Paulo to provide DNA samples to aid in identification of the remains, said state civil defence co-ordinator Henguel Pereira.
The plane’s so-called “black box” containing voice recordings and flight data is undergoing analysis, said Marcelo Moreno, the head of Brazilian aviation accident investigation centre Cenipa, at a press conference in Vinhedo.
The plane, an ATR-72 turboprop, was bound for Sao Paulo from Cascavel, in the state of Parana, and crashed around 1.30pm (1630 GMT) in Vinhedo, some 80km (50 miles) northwest of Sao Paulo.
Videos showed the plane in a downward spin on Friday before it crashed.
Despite coming down in a residential area, no one on the ground was hurt.
The aircraft was flying normally until 1.21pm, when it stopped responding to calls, and radar contact was lost at 1.22pm, Brazil’s air force said in a statement.
Pilots did not report an emergency or adverse weather conditions, the air force added.
Franco-Italian ATR, jointly owned by Airbus and Leonardo, is the dominant producer of regional turboprop planes seating 40-70 people.
ATR told Reuters on Friday that its specialists were “fully engaged” with the investigation into the crash.
The plane had been in use since 2010 and was in compliance with current standards, the National Civil Aviation Agency said, adding that the four crew members were all fully certified.
Marcel Moura, regional carrier Voepass’s operations director, said the plane had undergone routine maintenance the night before the accident and that “no technical problems” were found.
However, experts suggested that icing of the plane’s wings may have been behind the accident.
Moura said the plane was a type that flies at an altitude “where there is a greater sensitivity to icing”.
Friday’s weather report had predicted possible icing but “within acceptable parameters for a flight”, he said.
Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has declared three days of national mourning for what was one of the worst aviation accidents in the country’s history.
In 2007, an Airbus A320 of Brazil’s TAM airlines overran a runway at Sao Paulo’s Congonhas airport and crashed into a warehouse, killing all 187 on board and 12 runway workers.
Two years later, an Air France A330 on a Rio de Janeiro-to-Paris flight crashed into the Atlantic. All 228 people on board died.