‘I went to the balcony and saw the plane spinning’

Eyewitnesses have described seeing the moment a passenger plane crashed in the Brazilian state of São Paulo killing all 61 people onboard.

“When I heard the sound of the plane falling, I looked out my window at home and saw the moment it crashed,” Felipe Magalhaes told Reuters news agency.

He ran out of his house in the town of Vinhedo to see where the plane had fallen. “Terrified and not knowing what to do, I jumped over the wall,” he said.

Nathalie Cicari lives near to where the plane crashed and said she was having lunch when she heard a “very loud noise very close by”.

She described it as being similar to the sound of a drone but “much louder”.

“I went out on the balcony and saw the plane spinning,” Ms Cicari told CNN Brasil.

“Within seconds, I realised that it was not a normal movement for a plane.”

The moment of impact was “terrifying”, she said. She was not hurt despite having to evacuate her house which was filled with a huge plume of black smoke after the crash.

Another witness called Pietro told Reuters he had seen “a lot of people” breaking into a condominium “to make videos”.

“What I saw was the wreckage of the plane, all that was left was the cabin,” he said.

At Cascavel Airport in the southern state of Paraná, where the plane had taken off bound for São Paulo city, a handful of passengers who missed the Voepass flight spoke of their feelings.

Adriano Assis said that when he had arrived at the airport there was a lack of information on take-off and nobody was at the counter to answer questions.

When someone did arrive, they told him he could not board yet, he said.

“I even argued with him, but he ended up saving my life,” Mr Assis told a local newspaper, as reported by Brazilian news agency Globo.

Another passenger, Jose Felipe, was initially going to book on to a Latam flight but instead went to try and board the Voepass plane.

“We thought we were going to go through Latam, but Latam was closed,” Mr Felipe told Reuters.

“I arrived early, waited, waited, waited, waited and nothing.”

“When it was 11:00 I came to look for [information] here,” he went on.

“Then they told me, ‘You’re not getting on this plane anymore because you’re past the boarding [time] limit.’

“So I fought, I even pushed a little bit, I told him, ‘Let me get on, I have to leave on this plane and he said, ‘No, I can rebook your ticket.’

“Man, it’s such an overwhelming feeling. I’m here shaking, my legs are here… Only God and I were aware of this moment.”