Palmas Futebol e Regatas is a club from Tocantins, a state in north-central Brazil where football lives in the shadow of the Copa do Brasil and the Serie A giants. The Copa Verde is a smaller regional championship for clubs in the North, Northeast, and Central-West - important enough to matter locally, not important enough to warrant chartered jets. The team had booked a small plane for the four players who could not mix with their COVID-negative teammates. Club president Lucas Meira flew with them. The match they were going to - Palmas versus Vila Nova - was played later that season by other rosters, but the story of Brazilian football now includes a second chartered flight that did not come home, alongside the 2016 LaMia disaster that killed Chapecoense.

The players on board were Marcus Molinari, Lucas Praxedes, Guilherme Noe, and a forward who went by the single name Ranule. Molinari was a defender. Noe had come up through youth football in Tocantins. Praxedes and Ranule, both in their early twenties, had been building their careers in the lower divisions that dominate the Brazilian game. Lucas Meira, the club president, was traveling with his players rather than staying behind in the front office. Wagner Machado, the pilot, was an experienced aviator whose family would later speak about his thirty years at the controls. Six people. Four of them footballers whose illness had forced them into a separate plane. None of them made it to the field.

The Aeronautical Accidents Investigation and Prevention Center, the Brazilian agency known as CENIPA, released its final report on March 30, 2023. The fire that followed the impact had consumed everything - bodies, baggage, paperwork, the weight-and-balance sheet the pilot may or may not have filled out. Investigators had to reconstruct the plane's load by interviewing relatives and friends, asking what each person had packed, weighing equivalent bags. Their conclusion was blunt: the Baron had been loaded roughly three hundred kilograms over its maximum gross weight, and the center of gravity was sitting about two inches behind its aft limit. Retracting the landing gear made the balance even worse. The aircraft had too much weight too far back, and the laws of aerodynamics are not negotiable.

No one weighed the passengers. No one weighed the bags. The probable cause, in CENIPA's language, was a loss of lift and control caused by improper loading. The contributing factors read like a checklist of skipped steps: failure to follow operational standards, poor flight planning that did not account for weight and balance, and - most painfully - failure to reject the takeoff when the plane would not climb. That last one is what pilots train for. When the aircraft pitches up and the climb does not come, when the runway is running out and the nose is high, you cut the throttle and stop the takeoff roll. Wagner Machado did not. The Baron left the runway a second time, retracted its gear, and there was no longer a way to save it.

The Associacao Tocantinense de Aviacao Aerodrome, where the takeoff began, is a private airstrip near Porto Nacional, a city on the Tocantins River roughly fifty kilometers from the state capital of Palmas. It is the kind of field you find all over the Brazilian interior - a single runway scratched into the cerrado, a hangar, a windsock, a place for small planes to move between towns the commercial airlines do not serve. The site is marked now by absence. The match in Goiania went forward. Other Palmas FR players wore black armbands. The club kept playing. Four young footballers, a club president, and a pilot who had flown for three decades are remembered on the Copa Verde record, next to a match score that reads as it would have read if the plane had climbed.