Passenger sent heartbreaking selfie to family before Brazil plane crashed and killed everyone on board
One of the 61 passengers who was tragically killed after a plane crashed in Brazil sent her family a selfie before her death.
As previously reported, a VoePass Flight 2283 carrying 61 people plummeted into a gated community in the city of Vinhedo on Friday (August 9).
The airline confirmed that the twin-engine turboprop plane was en route to Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos International Airport with 57 passengers and four crew members on board when it crashed. There were no survivors.
“The company regrets to inform that all 61 people on board flight 2283 died at the site,” Voepass said in a statement. “At this time, Voepass is prioritising provision of unrestricted assistance to the victims’ families and effectively collaborating with authorities to determine the causes of the accident,” they added.
The plane took off from Cascavel Airport at 11:46AM local time, per CBS News.
At 11:47AM, while Flight 2283 was ascending, a passenger named Rosana Xavier, 23, sent a series of concerning messages to her family.
“Man, two hours of flight,” she penned in a text shared by her mother, Rosemeire Xavier, with TV Globo, reported by Daily Mail. “We’re going to arrive in the rain. I am so scared of this flight,” Rosana said, adding, “I swear. The plane is old.”
She then told her loved ones that there was a “broken seat” on the flight, adding: “Chaos,” before snapping one last selfie, which showed her looking stone-faced selfie.
This is the selfie she sent:
Rosemeire, who was very distressed after receiving the alarming texts from her daughter, asked Rosana to read a Bible verse to calm her fears. She then found out about her daughter’s fate through a news report on television.
“I was in despair,” the bereaved mom said. “I started running around the house screaming.”
She explained that her daughter worked from home in the city of Franco de Rocha in São Paulo, but was required to attend meetings twice a month in Toledo, Paraná.
“She helped with the shopping at home and had bought her own car,” Rosemeire said. “Everything she had was for me, my husband, my girls. She only thought about us. Her money was for helping at home.”
Harrowing footage of the moments before the fatal impact was shared online, showing the aircraft spinning out of control before rapidly descending and crashing behind a cluster of trees close to houses. It did not land on any residences, and no one on the ground was injured, officials confirmed.
Many of the victims on board the fateful flight have now been named, including the “experienced” pilot Captain Danilo Santos Romano, co-pilot Humberto de Silva, flight attendants Débora Soper Avila, 29, and Rubia Silva de Lima, 41, Globo TV News reported.
Other victims included an elderly couple – José Cloves Arruda, 76, and his wife Maria Auxiliadora vaz de Arruda, 74, and three-year-old Liz Ibba dos Santos, who was traveling with her father, 41-year-old Rafael Fernando dos Santos, per the outlet.
The flight also contained several doctors who were heading to a seminar, including Arianne Albuquerque Estavan Risso and Mariana Comiran Belim, who were both clinical oncology residents from the Cascavel Cancer Hospital (Uopeccan).
FlightRadar24 said on X (formerly Twitter) that there was an “active warning for severe icing” between 12,000 feet and 21,000 feet in the area where the plane crashed.
They noted that in its final minute, the plane’s transponder recorded a vertical speed of between 8,000 and 24,000 feet per minute.
According to AP News, a report from Globo’s meteorological center stated it “confirmed the possibility of the formation of ice in the region of Vinhedo,” and local media cited analysts pointing to icing as a potential factor for the horrific tragedy.
However, Brazilian aviation expert Lito Sousa suspects that weather conditions alone might not explain what happened.
“Analyzing an air crash just with images can lead to wrong conclusions about the causes,” Sousa said. “But we can see a plane with loss of support, no horizontal speed. In this flat spin condition, there’s no way to reclaim control of the plane.”
Our thoughts continue to go out to everyone affected by this tragedy.
