Black box recorders retrieved from Concorde

4:00 PM

PARIS - Investigators probing the crash of an Air France Concorde, which killed 113 people this morning, have found the plane's "black box" flight recorders.

The flight data recorder and the voice recorder could hold the key to what caused the plane to plunge in a ball of fire shortly after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris.

All 109 people aboard plus 4 people on the ground died when the aircraft, bound for New York, slammed into a hotel in the town of Gonesse, about 6 km southwest of the airport.

The 100 passengers comprised 96 Germans, 2 Danes, an Austrian and an American. The plane had 9 crew.

The passengers were flying to New York to meet up with the five-star liner Deutschland for a 15-day luxury cruise down into the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal to Ecuador.

Air France confirmed on Tuesday that one of the supersonic airliner's four engines caught fire. Witnesses reported seeing a trail of flames streaming from behind the aircraft as it left the airport.

Witnesses said the pilot appeared to have tried to turn the aircraft back for an emergency landing before, in the words of one onlooker, it "flipped over like a pancake."

- REUTERS