MERIDA, Venezuela (Reuters) - Rescue workers found two flight recorders on Saturday in the wreckage of a passenger plane that veered off course and slammed into the sheer face of an Andean mountain, killing all 46 people on board.
The "black box" recorders may explain what happened in thelast moments before local airline Santa Barbara's flight 518crashed into a 13,000-foot (4,000 meter) rock wall known asIndian Face on Thursday soon after taking off from Merida, ahigh-altitude tourist town.
Ramon Vinas, who heads Venezuela's civil aviationauthority, turned over the boxes to public investigators. Hesaid one contained recordings of the pilots' conversations andthe other held technical data.
Rescuers battling with wind and fog rappelled fromhelicopters and a camp above the crash site to search forremains in the plane's blue and white wreckage on flame-charredrocks.
For years, Venezuelans have debated whether Merida'sairport should be shut because it is hemmed in by mountains,although its accident record is not especially noteworthy.
Before the crash, the weather had been good and the roughly20-year-old twin-engined plane had a solid maintenance recordand no history of technical problems, authorities said.
The experienced pilot had specialized training for flyingthrough the Andes. He made no distress calls before crashingwith 43 passengers and a crew of three aboard.
Aircraft are banned from flying from Merida at night. Theplane that crashed on Thursday was the day's last flight out.
Santa Barbara is a small airline that covers domesticroutes and has seven Merida flights a day. The plane was an ATR42-300, a turboprop built by ATR, a French-Italian jointventure between EADS and Finmeccanica.
French investigators and an ATR team were going toVenezuela to help in the probe of the crash.
Thursday's was the second major air accident in Venezuelathis year. Last month, 14 people, including eight Italians andone Swiss passenger, died when a plane crashed into theCaribbean close to a group of Venezuelan islands.
(Reporting by Enrique Andres Pretel and Jorge Silva;Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Bill Trott)
