Relatives of the 229 people killed when a Swissair plane crashed into the Atlantic made the grim journey yesterday to the scene of the disaster in Canada.
Nearly 100 bereaved family members were travelling on a special Swissair flight from Switzerland to Nova Scotia, where they hope to recover bodies of relatives who died when Flight 111 plunged into the ocean on Thursday night.
Another special Swissair flight was due to bring relatives from New York, in effect retracing the fatal route of the crashed MD-11 jet which was en route to Geneva from New York.
Hoping to shield them from media and onlookers, officials erected olive green army tents on the wind-swept rocky shore near Peggy's Cove so families could look out at the waters where the aircraft went down.
Among those heading to the crash site was Ms Claire Mortimer, who lost her father John Mortimer, a senior vice president of the New York Times.
"I want to see the scene where my father died," she said. "To go there will give me a sense of completion." Another of the victims has been identified as the Saudi businessman, Prince Bandar ibn Saud ibn Abdel Rahman.
Victims of the crash were from Afghanistan, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, Russia, St Kitts, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and Yugoslavia. Americans formed the largest group on the aircraft - 131 passengers and one crew member - according to a revised list released by Swissair yesterday.
Searchers intensified efforts to find the wreckage of the MD-11 wide-body aircraft. The pilots radioed that the cabin filled with smoke before it crashed, just 10 minutes short of an emergency landing in Halifax.
The military brought a Canadian Navy submarine out of retirement to try and locate the flight data and voice recorders - the so-called "black boxes" - with sonar. But the submarine surfaced after failing to find the main part of the aircraft where the boxes are housed. The boxes are often the key to discovering what went wrong after an air disaster.
Swissair said there were almost certainly no survivors and the Canadian military was due to decide yesterday afternoon whether, some 36 hours after the crash, to stop hunting for survivors and make salvage efforts the top priority.
A makeshift morgue was set up at a military base in a nearby town to assist in identifying victims. About 36 bodies and many more body pieces have been recovered from the ocean so far, Canadian officials said.
Grief counsellors were on hand to aid the relatives, and officials prepared to accommodate 600 to 800 family members at the site although it was unclear how many would arrive.
Searchers described finding very small pieces of crash debris and bodies dismembered by the incredible force of the plane's impact with the water.
At its peak, some 1,000 rescue workers and a flotilla of fishing boats, eight Coast Guard and four Navy ships plied the waters off the coast of picturesque Peggy's Cove.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has not ruled out criminal activity in the crash although officials say there is no indication of terrorism at this point.
It emerged yesterday that US authorities ordered a modification in March 1996 to the cabling in McDonnell Douglas MD-11 jets like the one which crashed on Thursday. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the order after one operator reported a burnt electrical cable in a cabin attendant console.
In Switzerland yesterday, Mr Philippe Bruggisser, chief executive of Swissair parent company SAirGroup, dismissed a suggestion that it failed to comply with a directive from the manufacturer in June 1997 to fix cabling in the rear wall of the cockpit so that wires would not rub together when the jet vibrated.
"Based on information we had before June, we made this modification to the plane that crashed on March 6th, 1997, at least three months before this airworthy directive was issued," he said.
It was unclear if the change was the same as the one described in the US directive. Meanwhile, a Glasgow-bound aircraft, with 217 passengers on board, had to divert to Labrador in eastern Canada yesterday after the crew "reported smoke in the cockpit".
The Canada-based Royal Air Boeing 757 put down safely at 5 Wing air force base in Goose Bay at 4.25 a.m. local time yesterday, having taken off from Toronto.
The base's Captain David Muralt said that the passengers "are little bit spooked because of what happened with the Swissair flight but everyone is OK."
US President Bill Clinton yesterday bowed his head in a moment's silent tribute to crash victims during his visit to Dublin. Mr Clinton, speaking to an audience of several hundred Irish government officials, businessmen and trade unionists, called the crash on Thursday night a terrible tragedy.
"The victims, their families, their friends are very much in our thoughts and prayers," Mr Clinton said.