Black Box From Yemeni Jet Is Found
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PARIS — A French official said Wednesday that search teams had located the beacon of a flight recorder from a Yemeni airliner that crashed Tuesday in the Indian Ocean, apparently killing all but one of the 153 people on board.
A spokeswoman for Alain Joyandet, the French minister for cooperation, said that search planes had located the signal from one of two black boxes Tuesday afternoon, 25 miles off the coast of Grand Comore island.
It was not immediately clear if the device was the plane’s cockpit voice recorder or the flight data recorder, which contains data on the plane’s altitude, speed and heading at the time of the crash. The flight recorders can sometimes be housed within a single unit, but often exist as two separate boxes bolted side by side within the tail section of the aircraft.
A teenage girl from the southern French city of Marseille is the only known survivor of the crash of Yemenia Airways Flight 626, which was carrying 142 passengers and 11 crew members from the Yemeni capital, Sana, to Moroni, the capital of the island nation of Comoros. She was identified in news reports as Baya Bakari, a 14-year-old of Comoran descent who was traveling with her mother.
News agencies said Wednesday that another passenger, also a child, might have survived the crash, but the French spokeswoman in the Comoros said there was only one confirmed survivor.
The Associated Press reported from Moroni that Miss Bakari was conscious in a hospital with bruises on her face and a gauze bandage on her elbow. Her father, Kassim Bakari, told French radio Wednesday that he had spoken to her by telephone. He said she had left Paris on Monday night with her mother to see family in Comoros.
When the plane crashed, he said she was ejected and found herself beside the plane in the water. “She couldn’t feel anything,” Mr. Bakari said. “She heard people speaking around her, but she couldn’t see anyone in the darkness.”
He described his daughter as fragile and said she could barely swim. “She’s a very timid girl,” he said. “I never thought she would escape like that.”
Mr. Joyandet told French radio that Miss Bakari had survived 12 hours in the water by clinging to a piece of debris. “She signaled to a passing boat, and it was able to pick her up. She really showed incredible physical and moral strength,” he said, adding that she was expected to be transferred soon to a Paris hospital.
The Yemenia flight originated in Paris on Monday aboard an Airbus A330 and stopped in Marseille before continuing to Sana, where passengers and the crew switched planes to an Airbus A310-300. French air safety authorities have said the jet was found to have “faults” in a 2007 inspection and had not returned to French airspace since.
Angry about the crash, a group of French youths of Comoran descent formed a human chain in front of the Yemenia check-in desk at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on Wednesday morning in an attempt to block passengers from boarding a flight for Sana.
News reports said around 60 passengers failed to check in, while around 100 people did board the flight, which took off as scheduled. A separate Yemenia flight that was due to depart for Sana Wednesday evening from Marseille has been delayed until Thursday, a spokesman for the Marseille airport said. He said the airline did not give a reason for the delay.
