One of the 62 people killed on the doomed flight in Brazil last week had fired off a string of chilling texts to her family warning that she was “so scared” of the “old” plane just before it crashed.
Rosana Santos Xavier, 23, had just boarded the ill-fated flight on her way home from a work trip last Friday when she started sending ominous messages to her family’s WhatsApp group, local outlet TV Globo reported.
“Man, two hours of flight,” Xavier sent in one of the texts. “We’re going to arrive in the rain. I am so scared of this flight. I swear. The plane is old.”
Seconds later, Xavier added: “There is a broken seat. I swear. Chaos.”
The young woman then sent her relatives a final, stone-faced selfie of her sitting onboard the plane.
Her mom, Rosemeire, said she had tried to calm her distressed daughter down by asking her to recite passages from the Bible — adding that she, too, had a bad feeling about the flight.
Soon after, the family saw TV news reports alerting them to the crash. Xavier was among the 62 passengers and crew who perished in the fiery wreck after the aircraft suddenly plunged to the ground in a residential part of Brazil’s Sao Paulo state.
“I was in despair,” the grieving mom said of the moment she realized the plane had gone down.
“I started running around the house screaming.”
Investigators are still trying to determine what caused the twin-engine ATR 72-500, which was being operated by Voepass, to crash — killing everyone on board.
The plane was en-route to for Sao Paulo from Cascavel when it crashed around 1:30 p.m. (local time) in in Vinhedo.
The aircraft had been flying normally until roughly 1:20 p.m., when it stopped responding to calls and radar contact was lost, Brazil’s air force said.
Flight tracking data showed the aircraft plunging a staggering 17,000 feet in about a minute.
Footage broadcast on local TV outlets showed the plane spiraling towards the ground before crashing behind a group of trees.
Despite coming down in a residential area, authorities said no one on the ground was hurt.
The bodies of the 58 passengers and four crew members were all recovered from the wreck site over the weekend.
