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Officials Find Black Box After Yemenia Airline Crash

01 Iulie 2009

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A French official says authorities may have found the flight data recorder, also known as the black box, from a Yemenia Air plane that crashed into the Indian Ocean off the coast of the Comoros.

The French news agency quotes French Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet as saying a signal from the black box was located by an aerial patrol 40 kilometers from Grande Comore island.

The Yemenia airliner had 153 people on board at the time it went down. Most of the passengers were from the Comoros. Sixty-six French nationals were also onboard.

So far, rescuers say there is just one survivor - a 14-year-old girl who was traveling with her mother from France to visit family. France mobilized military and civilian rescue teams in the hopes of finding more people alive.

The cause of the crash is unknown. A Yemeni civil aviation spokesman Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Kader says winds were high at the time of the crash, and the plane was attempting to land in the middle of the night.

France's Transport Minister, Dominique Bussereau, says French inspectors detected a number of faults with the airplane during a 2007 inspection and that Yemenia Air was being subjected to closer inspections.

The Yemenia Air plane is the second Airbus plane to crash this month. An Air France Airbus A330, traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean June 1, killing all 228 people onboard.

Airbus says it is sending a team of specialists to the Comoros to help with the crash investigation.

The Comoros is made up of three islands about 300 kilometers northwest of Madagascar, in the Mozambique channel.

VOA News