Indian investigators are today searching the rubble of a plane crash at Mangalore airport for cockpit voice and flight data recorders after the country's worst air crash in more than a decade killed 158 people.
Eight people survived yesterday's crash of an Air India Boeing 737-800 that overshot a hilltop runway in southern India and plunged over a cliff, officials said. At least some of the survivors managed to jump from the wreckage just before it burst into flames.
Recovery of the black boxes is crucial for determining what went wrong with the aircraft as it came for landing after a flight from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
"It is not possible to give any reason for the crash unless we find the black box," Peter Abraham, Mangalore airport director, told Reuters.
About a dozen aviation experts were seen examining the jet's mangled hull. At a distance, workers use bulldozers and metal-cutters to clear debris.
Although it was not clear what caused the crash, some Indian TV channels focused on the possibility of human error. India's Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said there were no indications of any trouble during the aircraft's landing. The weather and visibility was good, he said.
"All other parameters like the aircraft functions and the runway looked to be very normal, so it should have been a normal landing," he said. "But I do not want to speculate on the cause."
Today, dozens of grieving relatives arrived from Dubai and the southern Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala to claim the bodies of their loved ones. An Air India spokesman said all eight of the survivors were in hospital and none had died overnight, as some Indian media had reported.
Investigators used cutters to search for the black boxes in the twisted wreckage of the aircraft, which was scattered along the hillside of thick grass and trees just outside Mangalore’s Bajpe airport.
After the first few minutes of the crash yesterday, there were no more survivors to be found around what remained of the Air India Express flight from Dubai to the coastal city. Instead, scores of burned bodies were pulled from the wreckage.
Air India, the country’s national carrier, runs inexpensive flights under the Air India Express banner to Dubai and other Middle Eastern destinations where millions of Indians are employed.
Weeping relatives of the victims visited hospitals where the bodies were kept. Ummer Farook Mohammed, a survivor burned on his face and hands, said it felt like a tyre burst after the plane landed. “There was a loud bang, and the plane caught fire,” he said.
“The plane shook with vibrations and split into two,” G.K. Pradeep, another survivor, told CNN-IBN television.
He jumped out of the aircraft with four others into a pit, he said. Moments later, a large explosion set off a blaze that consumed the wreckage, he said. It was not immediately clear if all the survivors escaped in the same way.
The plane was carrying 160 passengers - all Indian - and six crew members, Air India official Anup Srivastava said. Four infants and 19 other children were among the passengers. The pilot, who was of Serbian origin, and an Indian co-pilot were among the dead, officials said.
The crash was the deadliest in India since the November 1996 midair collision between a Saudi airliner and a Kazakh cargo plane near New Delhi that killed 349 people.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed condolences and promised compensation for the families of the victims. Boeing said it was sending a team to aid in the investigation.
Agencies