Air India Sunday said that 87 bodies have been handed over to the family members and relatives of
the passengers who died in the Mangalore plane crash.
All the 158 bodies have been recovered from the crash site, Air India spokesperson Harpreet Singh De said.
"All the 158 bodies have been recovered from the crash site and 87 bodies have already been handed over to relatives," De told reporters here Sunday.
Air India was trying its best to provide all assistance to the passengers' family members, she said.
International Agency for emergency response and rescue operations, US-based Kenyon, has already been contacted by Air India to support the airline in the search and retrieval operation, she said.
"We have deputed one person from our emergency management to assist the relatives at Mangalore," De said.
She said that investigations by the DGCA and Air India's flight safety department were on and the black box of the crashed aircraft is yet to be recovered.
In the country's worst air disaster in a decade, a Boeing 737 plane of Air India Express overshot the airport runway in Mangalore city in south India and burst into flames Saturday
morning killing 158 people but eight others survived.
Out of the eight survivors, four received minor injuries while three sustained major injuries. One person also escaped unhurt.
A majority of the victims were Keralites. The entire six-member crew including the two pilots perished in the accident. The passengers comprised 105 men, 32 women, four infants and 19 other children.
An Airport Authority of India (AAI) official said there was no distress call from the pilots when they got clearance for landing the plane, about seven kms away from touchdown.
The air mishap was the first major plane crash in the country in nearly a decade. 61 people were killed when a Boeing 737 aircraft of domestic airline Alliance Air, crashed
into a residential area near Patna airport in July 2000.
The country's worst aviation accident occurred in 1996 when two passenger planes collided in mid-air near New Delhi with the loss of all 349 on board both flights.