A black box flight recoder has been located belonging to the Yemenia Airways plane that crashed into the Indian Ocean with 153 people on board.

Crashed plane's black box located.

Only one survivor, a 14-year-old Franco-Comoran girl, has been found so far and officials said almost all are feared dead.

The girl, identified as Bakari Bahia, was pulled from the sea after the plane crashed on its way in to land at Moroni - the capital of the main island of the Comoros archipelago - under darkness on Tuesday morning.


She had cuts to her face and a fractured collar-bone, but was stable overnight. She was picked up during rescue efforts by local fishermen and speedboats sent by authorities on the main island, Grande Comore.

"Her health is not in danger. She is very calm given the shock she suffered," local surgeon Ben Imani said at Moroni's El Marouf hospital.

French and US aircraft have joined the search where the Airbus A310-300 went down off the Comoros archipelago.

Sixty-six French nationals were aboard the doomed flight. A full list of those on the flight has not yet been published, but a Yemeni official said there were also nationals from Canada, Comoros, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, the Philippines and Yemen on board.
The plane was flying the final leg of a trip from Paris and Marseille to Comoros via Yemen.
The Paris-Marseille-Yemen leg of the Yemenia flight was flown by an Airbus A330. In Sanaa, those passengers who were flying on to the Comoros changed onto a second Yemenia plane, the A310 that crashed.

French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said France had banned the Yemenia A310 from French soil after faults were found in a test in 2007.

"The question we are asking ... is whether you can collect people in a normal way on French territory and then put them in a plane that does not ensure their security. We do not want this to happen again," he said.

But Yemen's transport minister said the plane was thoroughly checked in May under Airbus supervision.

"It was a comprehensive inspection carried out in Yemen ... with experts from Airbus," Khaled Ibrahim al-Wazeer told Reuters from Sanaa. "It was in line with international standards."
Yemenia is 51 percent owned by Yemen and 49 percent by Saudi Arabia. Its fleet includes two Airbus 330-200s, four Airbus 310-300s and four Boeing 737-800s, according to its website.
Airbus said it was dispatching a team of investigators to the Comoros. It said the aircraft was built in 1990 and had been used by Yemenia since 1999. Its engines were built by Pratt and Whitney, a unit of United Technologies.

A Yemenia official said there were 142 passengers including three infants, and 11 crew. The weather was rough, with high winds, but the cause of the crash is still unknown.
With a population of around 800,000, the formerly French-ruled Comoros archipelago comprises three islands off mainland east Africa and just north-west of Madagascar.

The crashed plane was the second Airbus to plunge into the sea this month. An Air France Airbus A330-200 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean killing 228 people on board on June 1.

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