Aviation attorneys at Clifford Law Offices in Chicago, internationally recognized for excellence in aviation law, are considering the causes of the crash of an ATR 72 turboprop twin engine plane that crashed about 50 miles short of its destination in Sao Paulo, Brazil, killing all 62 on board on Friday, August 9, 2024.
Highly experienced with that aircraft in particular, aviation attorneys at Clifford Law Offices said every possibility has to be considered when a plane suddenly falls from the sky in mid-flight. Clifford Law Offices was Lead Counsel in the crash of the same type of aircraft, an ATR turboprop, in the 1994 crash in Roselawn, Indiana, killing all 68 on board in a short flight from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Chicago. There, it was found that the plane that suffered a loss of aileron control due to ice accretion that the plane’s boot mechanism was unable to kick off, leading it to crash from 16,000 feet.
Early reports from Brazil indicate that this plane was about 17,000 feet in the air when it also appeared to lose control before spiraling down in a residential neighborhood with rainy conditions at the surface. The winter weather in Brazil at this time of year means that the temperature was about zero degrees at that height, similar to the weather during the Roselawn, Indiana crash. That crash led the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to issue dozens of safety recommendations that resulted in numerous ATR airplane design and operational changes.
“At this stage, nothing can be ruled out,” said Robert A. Clifford, founder and senior partner of Clifford Law Offices and Lead Counsel of the Boeing 737 MAX8 aircraft that crashed in Ethiopia, killing all 157 on board. “As we found out in the Roselawn crash, the formation of ice on a plane during flight is highly dangerous because it can change the performance and stability and control characteristics, which can then quickly lead to catastrophic loss of control. Data from the airplane’s ‘black boxes’ should soon help investigators determine the causal issues and begin giving the victim families some idea of what happened and why.”
The Brazilian airline VoePass provided a manifest that indicated 58 passengers and four crew members were aboard Flight 2283 when the ATR 72 turboprop crashed Friday afternoon (August 9, 2024). Flight tracking website Flightradar24 reportedly said data sent from the plane indicated it was diving at 8,000 to 24,000 feet per minute in the last 60 seconds of the flight before it crashed about 1:30 p.m. local time.
ATR’s are manufactured by a joint venture of Airbus in France and Italy’s Leonardo S.p.A.
Clifford Law Offices also represented the family of Brazilian entrepreneur Matias Machline and his wife Marina who were killed in a helicopter crash in New York in 1994. Weather was a factor in that crash.
For further information or to speak to one of the aviation attorneys at Clifford Law Offices, contact Clifford Law Offices Communications Partner Pamela Sakowicz Menaker at 847-721-0909 (cell).