By: Rachel Chen

On Friday August 9th, 2024, a plane flying from Cascavel, Brazil to Sao Paulo crashed in a gated community in the small city Vinhedo. Fortunately, no one on the ground was injured. However, all 58 passengers and 4 crew members on the plane died. Investigators and aviation experts are trying to figure out what caused the tragic incident.

Investigators said that the plane started spinning slowly, then fell 17000 feet from the sky because the plane had stalled, meaning that the plane’s wings lost the lift it needed to keep flying. An airplane pilot for 25 years now, John Cox, stated that it’s like an equation, how you cannot have something without another. He said, “You can’t get into a spin without stalling.”

Investigators still don’t know what caused the plane to stall and they don’t know when they will find out for sure. However, the leading crash theory is that the plane may have stalled because of icing, which means ice built up on the plane’s wings.

Usually, passenger planes have a feature that allows them to break up any ice that forms on the plane. Jeff Guzzetti, a former crash investigator said, “Did the crew activate the icing system? Or did they activate it and it failed?”

John Cox found out that the plane was traveling at a speed of about 325 miles per hour when its speed dropped sharply minutes before the plane crashed. However, the speed was not low enough to possibly cause a crash unless the icing was extreme.

However, icing alone would not have caused the plane to crash. A pilot would’ve seen the iced wings of the plane. Even if the system to break ice malfunctioned, the pilot could’ve lowered the plane to a lower altitude so the ice could melt.