Crash plane's black box found

Investigators have recovered the digital flight data recorder of the Air India flight which crashed and killed 158 people in southern India over the weekend, police said today.

The device, which indicates the plane’s speed, angle and landing approach, could provide clues about India’s worst air accident in 14 years.

The Boeing 737-800 flight from Dubai to the Indian city of Mangalore overshot a hilltop runway, crashed and plunged over a cliff on Saturday, and officials said human error may have been to blame.

Aviation investigators found the other black box – the cockpit voice recorder - in the wreckage on Sunday. Earlier reports erroneously said both black boxes were found on Sunday, but police later said the second device was found today.

“It’s intact,” police officer Seemant Kumar said.

Saturday’s crash was the deadliest in India since the November 1996 mid-air collision between a Saudi airliner and a Kazakh cargo plane near New Delhi in which 349 people were killed.

India’s Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said yesterday that human error might have caused the weekend crash. Weather conditions and other factors at the time “looked absolutely normal for a regular touchdown and a safe landing”, the minister told the CNN-IBN television news channel.

Of the 166 passengers and crew on board, only eight people survived the crash.

Today, Air India flew the body of the flight’s commander, Zlatko Glusica, to Frankfurt in Germany, where it will be received by his son and brother and later taken to his native Serbia, airline spokesman K Swaminathan said. Mr Glusica, 55, had been flying for Air India for three years.

Meanwhile, doctors carried out DNA tests on 22 bodies which were so badly burned that relatives could not identify them, said Suresh Babu, an official at Wenlock hospital in Mangalore. They included a two-year-old boy.

The flight from Dubai was carrying some of the millions of Indians who work as cheap labour in the Middle East back to their families during India’s summer holiday season.