'Black boxes' found as India mourns 158 air crash dead

INVESTIGATORS searching for clues as to what caused India's worst air disaster in more than a decade recovered the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder yesterday from the charred remains.

• Mourners have been attending the funerals of crash victims in the area.

A total of 158 people died in the crash of the Air India Express Boeing 737-800, which overshot a hilltop runway in southern India and plunged over a cliff on Saturday. Only eight survived, many by jumping from the wreckage just before it burst into flames.

A four-member US forensic team has arrived in India to help with the investigation.

Air India, the national carrier, runs budget flights under the Air India Express banner to Dubai and other Middle East destinations where millions of Indians are employed.

May and June is the summer holiday season for Indian expatriates to attend weddings and visit their families back home.

Dozens of devastated relatives arrived yesterday from Dubai and the southern Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala to take home the bodies of their loved ones. Many of the dead were strapped into their seats, their bodies burned beyond recognition.

Arvind Jadhav, Air India's chairman, said 146 of the bodies had been identified and were being handed over to the relatives for funeral.

The dead included Mahendra Kulkarni, a telecommunications company director in the emirates, who was flying back to India with his ailing mother-in-law after she slipped into coma.

Mohammed Siddiqui, 27, boarded the doomed flight in Dubai within hours of a phone call from his family in Kerala informing him of his father's sudden death. He was rushing to attend the funeral on Saturday. Now his family are mourning his death as well.

Air India said all eight survivors, who have not been named, remained in hospital yesterday.

Ummer Farook Mohammed, a survivor burned on his face and hands, said it felt like a tyre had burst after the plane landed. "There was a loud bang, and the plane caught fire," he said.

GK Pradeep, another survivor, said: "The plane shook with vibrations and split into two." He told how he jumped out of the aircraft with four others into a pit. Moments later, a large explosion set off a blaze that consumed the wreckage, he said.

It was not yet clear if all the survivors escaped in the same way.

The 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 that killed 349 people.

The crash happened about 6am when the plane tried to land at Bajpe, about 19 miles outside Mangalore, and overshot the runway.

The Mangalore airport's location, on a plateau surrounded by hills, made it difficult for the firefighters to reach the crash site. Aviation experts said Bajpe's "tabletop" runway, which ends in a valley, made a bad crash inevitable when a plane did not stop in time.

Disaster underlines fears over airline industry safety

THE Air India Express disaster "was a crash waiting to happen" and has underlined fears about safety gaps in the country's booming airline industry, aviation experts have warned.

They claim regulatory oversight of safety and quality control are often poor, while staff training standards are falling.

Although India has had few major accidents in recent years, some half a dozen mid-air misses over the past year has underscored that safety issues exist. Last year, an Indian Airlines plane with about 150 passengers on board only just avoided a collision with an army helicopter that was part of the Indian president's entourage in Mumbai.

According to the Indian media, routine checks often reveal pilots reporting drunk for duty, and in one instance last year, pilots and crew were involved in a mid-air scuffle, leaving the aircraft to fly on its own for some time.

A Ranganathan, an airline safety consultant and pilot instructor, said: "The Air India Express crash was waiting to happen. Safety standards in Indian aviation have been on the wane for the last six years. The systematic rot is so deep … we are not likely to see any improvement in safety unless drastic changes are made."

Mangalore's hill-top airport has other geographical challenges, and critics have said the runway, though adequate for landing the Boeing 737 that crashed, was not long or wide enough to leave room for error. "This was no accident, but the direct result of the deliberate failure of officials at the high levels," said the Environment Support Group.