São Paulo, Brazil – Brazil’s Legal Medical Institute (IML) on Thursday announced it had identified all 62 victims of a Voepass Airlines flight that crashed in the city of Vinhedo last Friday. Authorities are investigating the cause of the crash.
According to the announcement, around 40 professionals, including doctors and teams of forensic dentistry, anthropology, and radiology, worked on the identification of the victims. The teams used medical documentation, in addition to collecting biological materials from the families for DNA testing.
The forensic doctors were able to identify most of the bodies via fingerprints, however, it was necessary to analyze the dental records of some victims, which were provided by the families. It was not necessary to perform DNA tests for biological confirmation.
“All identification was made possible by analyzing fingerprints compared with personal documents provided by the families and dental arches,” said the superintendent of the Technical-Scientific Police of São Paulo, Claudinei Salomão.
According to Salomão, the position in which many bodies were found – hugging their legs, with their heads lowered – indicates that the passengers may have been warned by the cockpit about an imminent crash. The so-called “brace” position is when passengers place their head between their knees and hug their legs during an emergency landing.
He also said it was “very likely” that the victims did not suffer at all. The IML concluded that everyone died from multiple trauma immediately when the aircraft hit the ground.
“A fall of four thousand meters in less than two minutes causes the human body to undergo movements so serious that they lead to fainting. Everyone died during the crash, due to the countless traumas suffered, but the tendency is for everyone to have already passed out.”
With the identification of the bodies, the families are already holding funerals and burying their loved ones in different states across the country. This Thursday, a seventh-day mass was held at the hotel in São Paulo where the families have been gathered since the accident, with the presence of about 60 relatives and authorities.
Read more: Families of victims killed in Brazil plane crash demand investigation
Now, the focus is on investigating the cause of the accident. The investigation center of the Brazilian Air Force (FAB) managed to fully recover the data from the aircraft’s two black boxes and intends to present a preliminary report within 30 days, as investigations of air accidents in Brazil can take up to two years.
In this preliminary report, the FAB is expected to present the main hypotheses of the accident based on the data recovered from the black boxes, which include information about the flight and recordings of conversations between the pilot and co-pilot.
Aviation experts have raised the possibility that the wings of the aircraft may have been covered with ice during the flight, causing instability and the crash. The plane was en route from Cascavel, in the south of the country, to São Paulo and crashed in Vinhedo, about 70km from the airport, when it was already in the descent procedure.
In addition to the FAB investigation, which is more focused on technical issues, the Federal Police is investigating possible criminal responsibilities – whether there was any omission or negligence of the airline. The police have already summoned the directors of Voepass to provide statements. The Public Prosecutor’s Office is closely monitoring the work.
This was the worst airplane accident in Brazil in 17 years. The last one was on July 17, 2007, when a Latam Airlines plane coming from Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, overran the runway during landing at Congonhas Airport in São Paulo and crashed into a Latam warehouse. All 187 people on board and 12 on the ground were killed.
