“I went to the balcony and saw the plane turning”

Eyewitnesses described seeing the moment a passenger plane crashed in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo killing all 62 people on board.

“I saw it pass over my house. It was in a nosedive and smoke was coming out of it,” Edival Monteiro de Souza, 67, told BBC Brasil.

“Then it went straight down and crashed at the top of the hill. It was all very fast. The noise was very loud, it made you shiver. Then black smoke went up and that was it.”

Letícia Oliveira do Nascimento, 25, said the falling plane looked like a paper airplane.

“It was clear that the pilot had lost control and that something bad could happen,” he told BBC Brasil.

“It was very close to the neighborhood where I live. As soon as it fell, all the smoke went up and there was silence.”

Nathalie Cicari lives near where the plane crashed, in the town of Vinhedo, and said she was having lunch when she heard a “very loud noise in the immediate vicinity.”

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

“I went out onto the balcony and saw the plane turning,” Mrs. Cicari said. CNN Brazil.

“Within seconds I realized that this was not a normal movement for an airplane.”

The moment of impact was “terrifying,” she said. She was not injured, although she had to evacuate her home, which was filled with a huge column of black smoke after the impact.

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

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

Another witness, named Pietro, told Reuters that he saw “many people” entering an apartment “to shoot videos.”

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

At the Cascavel airport in the southern state of Paraná, where the plane to São Paulo had taken off, a group of passengers who had missed the Voepass flight expressed their feelings.

Adriano Assis stated that when he arrived at the airport there was no information about the take-off and there was no one at the counter to answer his questions.

When someone arrived, they were told they couldn’t board yet, he said.

“I even argued with him, but in the end he saved my life,” Assis told a local newspaper, as reported by Brazilian news agency Globo.

Another passenger, Jose Felipe, was initially supposed to book a Latam flight, but then tried to board the Voepass plane.

“We thought we were going through Latin America, but it 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 continued.

“Then they told me: ‘You will never get on this plane again because you have passed the boarding area.’ [time] limit.’

“So I fought, I even insisted a little, I told him: ‘Let me get on, I have to leave on this plane’ and he said: ‘No, I can book another 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.”