How Brazilian jet is the most recent in a collection of aviation tragedies

Following the death of all 62 people on board a passenger jet to São Paulo in Brazil, the world has been left reeling from the awful tragedy.

Footage has circulated worldwide showing the twin-engine turboprop descending and spiralling as it falls.

Even more harrowing images were then shared showing the plane’s smoking wreckage in an area full of houses. 

Yet, the Brazil plane’s ‘death spiral’ is only the latest in a series of aviation tragedies over the last 10 years.

From an Eastern Boeing 737-800 smashing into the mountainous Guangxi area in China to 157 passengers and crew being killed in an Ethiopian Airlines crash, this is a look at some of the world’s worst plane tragedies.

Brazil, August 2024

A Voepass Linhas Aéreas flight plummeted and crashed in the city of Vinhedo, Brazil on Friday, killing all 62 people on board.

The plane was on its way from Cascavel to Guarulhos cruising at 17,000 feet when it began the sudden descent. 

Chilling footage shared by Brazil’s TV GloboNews showed a plane spiraling out of the sky seconds before the crash. Another angle showed the plane’s sickening descent before a huge plume of black smoke rose from the ground.

The local firefighters corps said there were no survivors, though relatives are still waiting for confirmation of the fate of their loved ones.

Voepass has since revealed that all those on board – including 57 passengers and four crew – were carrying Brazilian-issued documents. Some of the passengers were doctors from Parana heading to a seminar.

Hawaii, June 2024 

A Boeing 737 Max 8 narrowly avoided disaster off Kauai, Hawaii, when bad weather forced a drastic course change, bringing the plane within 400 feet of the Pacific Ocean. No one was injured in the incident.

Southwest Flight 2786 departed on April 11 from Honolulu International Airport to Lihue Airport in Kauai. The aircraft plummeted nearly 16,000 feet to an altitude of 409 feet following an aborted landing attempt as a result of stormy weather.

The close call stemmed from a failed landing attempt in Kauai due to poor visibility that prevented the pilots from spotting the runway at their descent altitude, a memo from the air carrier revealed.

The memo also noted that the despite the bad weather, the captain insisted that the ‘newer’ first officer take command of the 100-mile interisland flight. 

With fewer miles under his belt, the less-experienced first officer made a critical error and accidentally pushed the controls forward, throwing the plane off balance and causing a rapid descent after reducing speed. 

China, March 2022

A China Eastern Boeing 737-800 smashed into the mountainous Guangxi area, killing all 132 people on board, while en route from Kunming to Guangzhou in March 2022. 

The crash left a 65-foot-deep crater in a mountainside, shattered the plane and set off a fire in the surrounding forest. More than 49,000 pieces of debris were found. 

Flight data from the black box recovered from the plane shows human input forced the plane into a nosedive as it plummeted to the ground.

The data also showed the aircraft was cruising at 29,100ft at 2.20pm on March 21. Around two minutes later it had plummeted to just over 9,000ft and 20 seconds after that it had fallen to just 3,225ft. 

The data indicates a vertical descent of 31,000ft per minute or around 350 mph. Altitude data also appeared to show aircraft regain height at around 7,5000ft before beginning its final descent.

Experts have said they believe the that only murder-suicide could explain how the plane ended up with a near vertical trajectory after failing to find any technical faults.

Ethiopia, March 2019

An Ethiopian Airlines jet crashed shortly after taking off from Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, killing all 157 passengers and crew on board. The plane was en route to Nairobi.

The plane had flown from Johannesburg to Addis Ababa earlier that morning and had previously underwent ‘rigorous’ testing on February 4.

But minutes into the flight the pilot sent out a distress call and was given clearance to return. An eyewitness said there an intense fire when the plane crashed and ‘everything is burnt down’.

In July 2023 – four years after the crash – a coroner in the UK concluded that the British victims on board died were ‘unlawfully killed’.

The inquest heard, in a final report from December 2022, that the Ethiopian Airplane Accident Investigation Bureau had found that a flying control system on the Boeing 737 Max aircraft had malfunctioned, causing the aircraft to begin ‘repetitive and uncommandable’ nose diving which the pilots could not physically control.

The inquest also heard that ‘safety critical’ information on the control system and awareness of the mechanism was deliberately not disclosed by two Boeing company pilots to the American authorities, which led to a lower level of training being needed to operate the planes.

Boeing was fined $2.3 billion (£1.8 billion) in 2021 after it was found that the actions of its employees had misled regulators about the control system. 

The coroner also found that a contributing factor in the victims’ deaths was that Boeing had failed to provide procedures to operate the system in a flight crew manual, and that information requested by Ethiopian Airlines’ training department was ‘incomplete’. 

The Ethiopian Airlines crash followed just months after another Boeing 737 Max plane, operated by Lion Air Max, crashed in Indonesia killing all 189 people on board. 

The aircraft were temporarily grounded or banned from airspace around the world.

Indonesia, October 2018 

Lion Air flight 610, a Boeing 737 Max, crashed minutes after takeoff from Soekarno-Hatta international airport in Indonesia on October 29, 2018.

The plane crashed into the Java Sea and left 189 people dead. Investigations later pointed to trouble with the automated flight system.

Boeing agreed on July 7 this year to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit fraud to settle allegations that it deceived Federal Aviation Administration regulators who approved the 737 Max and then broke a 2021 settlement that would have let the company escape criminal prosecution.

Under the deal, Boeing would pay a fine of at least $243.6million, invest $455million in compliance and safety programs, and be placed on probation for three years. 

The US Justice Department and Boeing would pick a monitor to oversee the company’s compliance.

Lawyers for relatives of some of the passengers killed in two 737 Max crashes – in Indonesia in 2018 and in Ethiopia in 2019 – asked the judge to reject the deal and instead schedule a jury trial within 70 days.

They say the plea deal that Boeing struck with US prosecutors is too lenient and lets the plane maker avoid accountability for causing 346 deaths.

Tokyo, March 1966

A British Overseas Airways Corporation flight took off as normal from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on March 5, 1966, destined for Hong Kong.

However, only moments after takeoff, the six-year-old jet was hit by extreme turbulence.

The plane was flying between 370mph and 425mph at 16,000ft near the iconic Mount Fuji.

Suddenly, the aircraft then started to emit white vapour and plummeted, losing altitude.

Parts of the plane then began to break away as witnesses watched in disbelief, as 124 people were then killed as it made impact with the ground.

Iowa, May 1962

Continental Airlines Flight 11 was a Boeing 707 aircraft which exploded in the vicinity of Centerville, Iowa.

The plane was flying from O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Illinois, to Kansas City, Missouri, on May 22, 1962. 

The plane suddenly crashed in a clover field near Unionville, in Putnam County, killing all 45 crew and passengers on board. 

Shockingly, following an investigation the cause of the crash was determined to be a suicide bombing, committed as insurance fraud.

The crash was caused by dynamite, detonated in the rear lavatory in an attempt at a life insurance fraud by one of the passengers.