What caused a plane to fall from the sky in Brazil?
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian investigators Saturday began analyzing the black boxes from a Sao Paulo-bound flight to try to understand why the passenger plane fell from 17,000 feet Friday, in a crash that killed all 62 on board.
But to aviation experts who watched videos showing the 89-foot plane spinning slowly as it plummeted before crashing almost directly on its belly, the question of what had happened was simple to answer: The plane had stalled.
In other words, the plane’s wings had lost the lift needed to keep the aircraft aloft, causing it to stop flying and start falling.
“You can’t get into a spin without stalling,” said John Cox, an airline pilot for 25 years who now aids plane crash investigations. “It’s A plus B equals C.”
The question of why VoePass Flight 2283 might have stalled, however, remained a mystery.
Did it lose significant speed? Did its nose pitch up too high? Did ice build up on its wings? Did an engine fail? Was its stall-warning system working? Were the two pilots tired or distracted?
The plane was carrying 58 passengers and four crew members on the nearly two-hour scheduled flight from Cascavel, Brazil, to Sao Paulo on Friday when it crashed in a gated community in the small city of Vinhedo, shortly before reaching its destination. No one on the ground was injured.
Crash investigators in Brazil said Saturday that they had recovered the plane’s two black boxes — one containing flight data and the other recordings from the cockpit — and were working to extract information from them.
The leading crash theory so far is that the plane may have stalled partly because it suffered from severe icing, meaning ice formed on its wings or on other parts of the plane, reducing its aerodynamic abilities and increasing its weight. With such icing, a plane has to travel at faster speeds to avoid stalling, experts said.
Brazilian officials had issued a warning about the potential for severe icing where the plane was flying when it crashed.
Passenger planes have systems to break up ice that forms on the wings. On the plane that crashed — an ATR 72-500 turboprop built in 2010 — that system consisted of rubber tubes on the wings that are supposed to inflate and deflate to break up any ice.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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