158 killed in India plane crash

New Delhi - At least 158 people were killed Saturday when Air India Express flight 812 from Dubai overshot the runway while landing in the western Indian city of Mangalore, officials said.

The Boeing 737-800 with 160 passengers and six crew members overshot the tricky hilltop runway and crashed into a forested gorge, airport officials and eyewitnesses said.

The aircraft broke into pieces and caught fire. Eight passengers, who managed to jump out, survived.

'Four of them suffered major injuries, three had minor injuries and one miraculously escaped unhurt,' federal Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said at a briefing in Mangalore.

Patel said more than 125 bodies had been recovered and it was hoped the rest would be retrieved by sundown.

An Air India official confirmed that 158 passengers and crew, including the two pilots, were dead.

'Many of the bodies are badly burned and charred,' Patel said. 'It will takes some time to identify them and hand them over to their kith and kin.'

Patel also said it was too early to say what caused the accident. He said the entire wreckage of the plane had been found and the black box was also expected to be recovered.

Patel said the two-and-a-half year-old aircraft had no history of defects or malfunction and the weather conditions were relatively normal when it landed.

Though it had been raining in the region since Thursday, there was no rain and the runway was dry when the aircraft landed, Patel said.

The commander of the aircraft, Z Glusica - a British national of Serbian origin - had 10,200 hours of flying experience and had flown planes at least 19 times to the Mangalore airport, the minister said.

Patel said a wing of the aircraft appeared to have hit an instrument at the end of the runway after which it veered off and fell 200 to 300 feet into the adjoining valley.

The airport on the outskirts of Mangalore is located in a hilly area. Landings and take-offs from its 2,450-metre runway have little overshoot area and are considered difficult, according to aviation experts.

Patel acknowledged that there was very little spill-over space along the runway - about 900 metres of sandy surface - but pointed out that the runway had been operational without any mishap since 2006.

India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation had ordered an enquiry into the accident and Air India had constituted a team of experts to establish the circumstances behind the accident, Patel said.

Indian media speculated that the crash could have been caused by a pilot error or a burst tyre.

'The aircraft touched down the runway 24 slightly beyond the touch down zone, overshot the runway and went in the valley beyond the runway,' a federal Civil Aviation Ministry release said.

All the passengers were Indian nationals, Air India's director of personnel, Anup Srivastava, said at a press briefing. The passengers comprised 105 men, 36 women and 19 children, four of them infants.

Firefighters took over four hours to douse the blazing aircraft.

Mangled parts of the plane were spread over a two-kilometre-radius of forested hillocks.

Fifteen teams of rescue workers were engaged for hours searching for survivors and victims.

All eight survivors had jumped from the aircraft immediately after it went off the runway. They escaped through gaping holes and broken windows as the aircraft cracked into pieces.

'A crack appeared on the plane's body where I was seated,' Ummer Farooq told the NDTV news channel from his hospital bed. 'I immediately jumped out. ... As I fled from the aircraft, flames engulfed it.'

Most of the crash victims belonged to the southern states of Kerala and Karnataka and were workers returning home from the Gulf region for a summer vacation
.

This is the first major aircraft accident in India since an Alliance Air Boeing-737 crashed into a residential area near the eastern city of Patna on July 17, 2000, killing 61 people.

Air India Express is a low-cost wing of the state-owned Air India.

India's worst aviation accident ever was November 12, 1996, when 349 people were killed in a mid-air collision of a Saudi Arabian Airlines
plane and a Kazakhastan Airlines plane over northern India.