What caused a plane to fall from the sky in Brazil?
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 around the world 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 main thing we know is that it's never one thing,» said Thomas Anthony, director of the aviation safety program at the University of Southern California.
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
