Two years after a Voepass turboprop fell out of the sky in Sao Paulo state, Brazilian prosecutors have attached names to the disaster. On August 7 they formally accused 16 current and former employees of the regional airline, among them its owner and president, Jose Luiz Felicio Filho, of crimes tied to the August 2024 crash that killed everyone aboard [1].
The flight was carrying 58 passengers and 4 crew. Adding the two groups, 58 plus 4, gives 62, and none of them survived [1].
The charges are specific. Prosecutors accuse the 16 of endangering air-traffic safety resulting in a fatal disaster, a count that carries up to 12 years, along with omitting technical failures from the aircraft's logbooks and negligence [1]. The logbook allegation is the heart of it: the case is not only that a plane failed, but that its failures were, in the prosecutors' telling, left off the record that is supposed to keep a defective aircraft on the ground.
Federal investigator Andre Ribeiro laid out what the record was supposed to have caught. The plane, he said, "was irregularly cleared for departure into known severe icing conditions despite experiencing de-icing system failures on three prior flights that same day" [1]. Read plainly, that is an account of a system that was known to be failing, on the same aircraft, on the same day, before it was sent up again with 62 people on it.
A formal accusation is not a verdict, and the 16 accused, including Felicio Filho, will answer the charges in court. What changed on August 7 is that the crash moved from a tragedy into a documented legal claim, one that names the people prosecutors hold responsible and spells out, in the language of an indictment, why they say the deaths of 62 people did not have to happen [1].
