“I missed my flight and saved my life”: ten people escape death due to an information error at the airport | El Diario Vasco

Two passengers who were unable to board the fateful flight last Friday that claimed the lives of all those on board the plane – which crashed in Vinhedo, Sao Paulo – were still at Cascavel airport when news of the accident arrived.

They gave interviews, shaking and with broken voices, thanking God for having missed the flight. After learning of the tragic outcome that left 61 dead and not a single survivor, they said that at least ten people missed that plane due to an information error that led them to wait for the flight at another gate and on another airline, that of the Latam company, according to reports. ABC.

When they discovered the mistake, they ran to the correct window and were informed that they could not board because the flight was already closed, even after having been delayed 18 minutes in its takeoff.

Passenger Adriano Assis had arrived at around 9:40 in the morning for the flight scheduled for noon, but the Latam counter was closed and he went to get a coffee. When he returned an hour later he was informed that his flight was another one and that he would miss it due to delay. Assis argued with the employee and tried to board at any cost because another flight to his final destination, Rio de Janeiro, was waiting for him in Guarulhos.

“I missed my flight. Dad loves you,” Assis told his daughter over the phone, in a video recorded by O Estado de São Paulo. “Dad is already on his way home. I missed my flight. Why did I miss my flight? Because the flight I missed crashed, the plane. God is very good, daughter. Dad loves you, okay?” he said emotionally. Assis recalled that he had been rude to the employee who prevented him from traveling. “He saved my life. He did his job,” he said gratefully.

The other passenger still found at the airport, José Felipe Araújo, 21, could not believe it either. “I think it was God. There were about 10 people complaining to the employee because he had not let us in,” he said. “When the news came out, everyone was saying that the plane to Guarulhos had crashed, I couldn’t stand up. My whole body was shaking,” said the young man who saw other passengers complaining about missing their flight because they had taken the wrong line like him.

Araujo spent the day at the airport trying to get back home, because his flight had two connections after Guarulhos, the city of Teresina and Maranhão, his homeland, a long trip that would take him to the north, the other end of the country to find his family.

Bad weather, the main hypothesis of the tragedy

Bad weather could have been one of the main reasons for the plane crash, after confirmation that the technical conditions of the flight and the crew had been assessed and were in order, and after the analysis of images showing thethe aircraft’s sudden, spiraling fall.

The Voepass airline, model ATR-72-500, was operating flight 2283 between Cascavel, in the south of the country, and Guarulhos International Airport, in São Paulo, when it crashed in Vinhedo, just 90 kilometers from its final destination, with 57 passengers and four crew members on board.

In an official statement, the National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC), the main Brazilian air traffic authority, reported that the aircraft took off from the city of Cascavel bound for São Paulo, without any flight restrictions and with all its systems ready for operation. The agency also reported that the aircraft was manufactured in 2010 and was in regular operating conditions, with valid registration and airworthiness certificates, and that the four crew members were duly qualified and had valid licenses.

Specialists consulted by various Brazilian media outlets identified that the accelerated and circling descent, entering a vertical spin, could be a sign of a “stall,” an English term used in aviation to refer to the moment when the aircraft loses aerodynamic lift, which causes a temporary loss of control and a drop in elevation. According to the specialized portal, Eflyacademy, this condition would not be related to the engine, but to the way the air flows over the wings of the plane.

“Every time it crashes like this, it’s because the wing has lost lift. If the controls weren’t blocked by ice, it could recover. But even in an accident in this position and depending on the ice buildup, perhaps even a pilot with a lot of experience in aerobatics would have difficulty getting out,” Laert Gouvêa, director of the Brazilian Institute of Air Safety, told the newspaper ‘O Estado de São Paulo’.

The specialist explained that the ATR-72 model flies at an intermediate altitude, between 14,000 feet and 24,000 feet, so it is more exposed to ice formation, especially when there are cold fronts, such as the one recorded this weekend in the south and southeast of Brazil, the regions through which the aircraft flew.

An A320 pilot who flew to Guarulhos airport on the same day of the tragedy reported ice forming on the side window of the cockpit, which is very rare and something he had not seen in 16 years of work. “I feel bad, I even cried at home now, remembering that I informed the control base. I did my job, I informed the control: ‘there is a serious formation of ice. That is the information, pass it on to your colleagues’,” O Globo quotes him as saying, without giving the name of the pilot or the source of the information.

Aeronautical engineer Celos Faria de Souza, a criminal expert in aviation accidents and director of the Brazilian Association for Flight Safety (Abravoo), confirmed to the same newspaper that low temperatures would have a 95% chance of being the main cause of the accident.

“Ice formation in the crash area was expected. Ice may have formed on the wing of the plane and the de-icing system, for some reason, did not work. As a result, the plane lost lift and fell as we see in the video,” he explains. The fact that the plane’s structure appears intact in the images reinforces this theory.