Minister: Plane crash may have been caused by human error

“You can’t rule out a human error factor,” Mr Patel said.

Only an inquiry could establish what exactly went wrong as the aircraft overshot the hilltop runway and crashed and plunged over a cliff and into a ravine at dawn on Saturday on the outskirts of the southern Indian city of Mangalore, he said.

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

Mr Patel said there was no rain in the area and visibility was good at the time of the plane’s landing.

Investigators and aviation officials searched through the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 strewn across a hillside to try to determine the cause of India’s worst air disaster in more than a decade.

They recovered the cockpit voice recorder which they hope will give them important clues, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

A four-member US forensic team also arrived in India to help in the investigation, said Harpreet Singh, an Air India spokeswoman.

By yesterday evening, 146 of the 158 bodies had been identified and handed to grieving relatives for burial, said Arvind Jadhav, Air India’s chairman and managing director.

Doctors were conducting DNA tests on 22 bodies that 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 black box would be sent to New Delhi for decoding and further investigations, officials said.

The flight from Dubai to Mangalore carried some of the millions of Indians who work as cheap labour in the Middle East back to their families for a rare visit during India’s summer holiday season.