The tragic incident in Brazil that went viral over the weekend has thrown up some mind-lowing near-miss stories.
While we at DMARGE often turn our attention to the lighter side of air travel gone wrong — think of the man who urinated in his business class cabin after a few too many complementary cocktails or the Chinese time-traveller who got his flight cancelled — but the heartbreaking events that took place last weekend have revealed some far more sombre and thought-provoking stories that are well worth our attention.
The Tragic São Paulo Crash
According to the BBC, all bodies have been recovered from the site of a plane crash in the Brazilian state of São Paulo which took place last weekend and sadly killed everybody on board, local authorities have confirmed. The twin-engine turboprop vehicle operated by airline Voepass came down over the town of Vinhedo, with teams working as fast as they could to recover and identify all 62 victims.
Voepass has since released a statement saying that the ATR 72-500 was carrying 57 passengers and four crew between Cascavel in the southern state of Paraná to Guarulhos airport in São Paulo city. However, it was later confirmed that an additional unaccounted-for passenger was on the flight.
Footage was widely circulated on social media, showing the plane descending in a terrifying vertical spiral. Eventually crashing into a residential area, it was a small miracle that no one on the ground was injured and that only one home in a local condominium complex was damaged.
The state of São Paulo said it concluded its operation to remove the victims’ bodies from the site at 18:30 local time on Saturday, before adding that all bodies — 34 males and 28 females in total — were being moved to a police morgue in the city of São Paulo, where they will be identified and released to the families in due course.
Close Calls
In the days since the crash, reports about passengers who were hoping to make the doomed flight but, by an intervention of destiny, managed to avoid taking the fatal journey have quickly gone viral. As American journalist Max Foster said on his TikTok profile: “Multiple passengers did not make the Brazil flight after going to the wrong gate. A man who missed the flight told Brazilian news outlet Globo that at least ten people were waiting at the wrong gate and missed the flight before it took off.” He went on to quote one of those passengers:
‘They said to me, Mister, you’re not getting on this plane because we’re already past the boarding limit. I even pressured them a little. “Mister, put me on this plane, I have to go,” then he said, ‘There’s no way, what I can do is rebook your ticket.’
In a horribly ironic twist, those passengers who didn’t make the flight were reported to have ben begging airline staff to let them on. Now, they have a decidedly different response to their being denied access:
“My legs are shaking; only God knows how I’m feeling,” said one man after finding out the plane’s fate. “Thank God, we didn’t get on that plane.”
@maxfostercnn CNN: Multiple passengers did not make the Brazil flight after going to the wrong gate A man who missed the flight told Brazilian news outlet Globo that at least ten people were waiting at the wrong gate and missed the flight before it took off. "They said to me, Mister, you're not getting on this plane because we're already past the boarding limit. I even pressured them a little. "Mister, put me on this plane, I have to go,' then he said, 'There's no way, what I can do is rebook your ticket," the man told Globo. When they realized they were at the wrong gate, the passengers begged the airport employees to board the plane but were told they could not. "My legs are shaking; only God knows how I’m feeling," the man said after finding out the plane had crashed. "Thank God, we didn't get on that plane." #brazil #flight #incident #plane #burnttoasttheory ♬ original sound – Max Foster | News Journalist
Eerily reminiscent of past events where travellers — including some major A-list celebrities like Mark Wahlberg and Michael Jackson — avoided the disaster by the skin of their teeth, the news sparked cries of ‘burnt toast theory‘, an idea that has recently become widely popular online whereby the act of burning a piece of toast and the requisite time to prepare a new one could, theoretically speaking, be the difference between you encountering or avoiding some unforeseen disaster.