SAO PAULO (AP) — A small aircraft crashed on an avenue in Sao Paulo on Friday morning shortly after taking off from a nearby private airport, killing the pilot and the plane’s owner, authorities said. The two were the only people on board.
The plane went down in the busy Barra Funda neighborhood on the west side of the city, near its downtown. A piece of the plane hit a bus, injuring one woman inside, while a motorcyclist was struck by another piece of wreckage, the firefighters’ statement said. Both were receiving medical care.
A later statement said that four more people who were injured were taken to hospitals in the area with minor injuries. Gov. Tarcísio de Freitas said on X that the two dead were the pilot, Gustavo Medeiros, and the owner of the aircraft, Márcio Carpena. A CCTV video obtained by the local television network TV Globo showed the moment of the crash. The plane slammed into the avenue a few meters (yards) past an intersection, where a line of cars was waiting to move forward.
Images on local media showed the plane’s fuselage and the bus on fire, with firefighters working to extinguish the blaze. The avenue is home to office buildings and there is a key bus, train and subway station nearby.
There was no word as to what had caused the plane to lose altitude less than 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the private airport from where it had departed a few minutes earlier. It was bound to Porto Alegre, in the southern Rio Grande do Sul state.
The Brazilian Air Force said it would investigate the accident as fast as possible.
Brazil has had a number of deadly, small aircraft crashes in recent years, including one last August in Vinhedo, near Sao Paulo that was particularly shocking. Images from that crash showed a passenger plane falling in a flat spin before crashing into the backyard of a home in a gated community, killing all 72 people on board.
