The plane that crashed in Brazil on Friday was called an “old wreck” by travelers familiar with the machine in the hours and days before it fell out of the sky.
On Friday afternoon, a Voepass Airlines flight that had departed from Cascavel, in Brazil’s Parana state, crashed in a residential area in the city of Vinhedo, in São Paulo state. It had been scheduled to fly to Guarulhos, also in São Paulo state, but sadly, it never made it. Video footage taken from the ground showed the plane quite literally dropping like a rock out of the sky. It hit the ground and exploded, killing all 62 people on board.
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Now, word is coming out that people who flew on the ATR 72-500 aircraft were terrified of how old and broken down it seemed to be prior to the crash. On Sunday, Brazilian outlet Globo G1 interviewed a woman named Maria de Fátima Albuquerque. She lost her daughter, Arianne Albuquerque Risso, in Friday’s crash. And the grieving mother did not mince words about how unreliable the plane was prior to its crash:
“It wasn’t a fatality, anyone who was on that plane would have died, because it was an old wreck. It wasn’t a fatality, it was a crime. Who can ease my pain? You’ll see me fighting every day.”
That’s far from the only comment about the plane’s apparent issues, either. A 23-year-old woman named Rosanna Santos Xavier was killed in Friday’s crash, as well. Just after she boarded the fateful flight — an hour before her death — she texted her family group chat about how she was worried that the plane wasn’t mechanically sound. Per that same news outlet, she wrote to her family members:
“I’m so scared of this flight, I swear, it’s an old plane. There’s a broken seat, it’s chaos.”
OMG…
The young woman’s mother, Rosemeire dos Santos Xavier, told her to read the Bible to calm her nerves. But Rosemeire had a bad feeling, regardless. And after seeing that the plane had gone down, the mother knew her instincts had been correct:
“I panicked. I started running around the house screaming.”
The plane had been recently undergoing a series of maintenance shutdowns recently, as well. Brazilian television news program Fantastico found that the Voepass aircraft had experienced significant hydraulic problems in March after abnormal contact with a runway caused “structural damage.”
To repair it, the plane was first flown to the state of Bahia, where it was parked for more than two weeks. Then, on March 28, it was flown to the Voepass aircraft maintenance plant in Ribeirão Preto, Sao Paulo. More than three months later, in early July, it was returned to service.
But immediately after that, it had another problem! It was forced to return to the Voepass plant in Ribeirão Preto after it experienced a depressurization in flight on its very first route. It went through another four days of repairs to fix that situation, and was then returned to service full-time on July 13 — a little less than a month before it crashed on Friday afternoon.
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On Thursday, one day before its fateful crash, passengers who boarded the very same plane reported that the air conditioning system was broken and the flight they’d been on was unbearably hot. Three people who took that Thursday flight between São Paulo and Goias reported that passengers experienced extreme heat after the plane suffered a cooling breakdown in flight. A woman named Angela Espíndola, who was on that prior flight one day before the plane crash, said:
“It was really hot. I was even scared because, usually, when you get on the flight, everything is ready to receive [the passengers]. It got colder towards the end, arriving in Guarulhos [Sao Paulo].”
Another passenger, Cleiton Feitosa, added:
“The heat inside the plane was unbearable.”
And a third, journalist Daniela Arbex, also said:
“I was very distressed by that situation, because I thought, if they are not capable of carrying out proper maintenance on a simple air conditioner, is this flight safe?”
So unsettling…
And there is still more to know about this tragedy. One of the 62 victims of Friday’s Voepass flight was a Brazilian lawyer who had been involved in at least 90 lawsuits against her home nation’s airlines! Laiana Vasatta was a 32-year-old woman who was an expert in aviation litigation for a major law firm in the South American nation. She specialized in legal cases against Brazilian airlines and their international competitors.
Sadly, she was killed on Friday’s flight, which she was taking to attend the wedding of a friend. Her husband Fábio Bigolin had initially been planning to catch the same flight, per the U.S. Sun, but ended up leaving for São Paulo on an earlier flight. And now, he is grieving the awful and untimely loss of his wife — along with all the other families of loved ones lost in the crash. So awful.
[Image via Movieclips/YouTube]
