United Nations peacekeepers, aviation investigators and relatives of the victims of Air Algerie Flight 5017 converged on the remote site in Mali on Saturday where the jet crashed.
The U.N. said in a statement early Saturday that it had recovered the second “black box” from the doomed flight, which disappeared early Thursday within an hour of taking off from an airport in Burkina Faso headed for Algeria. The plane came down in a barren area in southern Mali, killing all 118 people on board.
Burkina Faso Prime Minister Luc-Adolphe Tiao described a horrific scene of charred and twisted airplane parts and such widespread destruction that identifying bodies would prove difficult for recovery teams.
“The plane has disintegrated and we have only seen fragments and pieces of bodies,” he said, according to Bloomberg.
Crash investigators hope the two flight data recorder, known as black boxes — the first of which was found earlier this week by French troops securing the site — can help explain what downed the jet. Burkina Faso and French government officials said the pilots radioed to air-traffic controllers in Niger to change course to avoid troubling weather in the area just before it disappeared.
Nick Wiltgen, a meteorologist with weather.com, said satellite images showed strong thunderstorm activity just north of the airport in Ouagadougou as the flight took off.
“The thunderstorms had been moving southwestward into that area for several hours, so in theory air-traffic controllers would have been aware of them and adjusting flight paths accordingly,” Witlgen said, according to weather.com.
As crash investigators download the data from those boxes and crash investigators pore through the wreckage for clues, officials allowed some relatives to visit the site themselves.
Victorien Sawadogo, a spokesman for the government of Burkina Faso, said a government helicopter flew three family members — from France, Lebanon and Burkina Faso — to the site. Sawadago said a psychiatrist accompanied the relatives. He said a second flight with other relatives was planned for later Saturday.
French President Francois Hollande and other high-ranking officials were scheduled to meet Saturday with some of the relatives of the 54 French nationals who were killed in the crash.
Meanwhile, Spanish officials offered assistance to investigate the crash — all six crewmembers aboard were from Spain.
Contributing: The Associated Press
-US TODAY
