Russia: Black boxes from plane crash site are badly damaged

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia (AP) - Aviation experts on Sunday began examining the black boxes from the FlyDubai flight that crashed amid high winds at an airport in southern Russia, killing all 62 aboard.

FlyDubai's Boeing 737-800 from Dubai nosedived and exploded in a giant fireball before dawn Saturday after trying to land for a second time in strong winds in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. FlyDubai confirmed all 62 people on the plane were killed. Most of the passengers were Russian.

Several planes had trouble landing at the airport at the time of the crash.

The Inter-State Aviation Committee said in a statement that the plane's data and voice recorders had been heavily damaged in the crash.

But Sergei Zaiko, deputy chairman of the committee, was quoted by Russian news agencies late Sunday as saying that the quality of material on the data recorder was high.

The black boxes were being viewed in Moscow by experts from Russia, the United Arab Emirates and France, the aviation commission said. The American-made Boeing plane had French-made engines.

At Rostov-on-Don, hundreds of people flocked Sunday to the airport, the region's largest, to lay flowers and leave candles and toys in memory of the dead. The city is 950 kilometers (600 miles) south of Moscow near the Ukrainian border.

Closed-circuit TV footage showed the plane going down at a steep angle and exploding. The powerful explosion left a big crater in the runway.

The airport remained closed, but workers on Sunday afternoon were repairing the damage to the runway, and plans are to reopen on Monday morning, the airport said in a statement.

FlyDubai's chief executive, Ghaith al-Ghaith, said on Sunday the plane had enough fuel to maintain its holding pattern, which reportedly went on for two hours. He expressed confidence in Russian authorities and said the carrier intends to resume flights to the airport once it reopens.

He reiterated that the Rostov-on-Don airport was open Saturday despite the high winds and was "good enough to operate" at the time of the crash, and that it was up to Russian authorities to make that determination.

Some of the crash victims were from rebel-held areas in eastern Ukraine where fighting between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government troops has killed more than 9,100 people in nearly two years. The war has turned the region's main airport of Donetsk into a wasteland, and many locals have been using the airport in Rostov-on-Don, across the border.

Self-proclaimed rebel authorities in Donetsk said Sunday that two residents had been killed in the crash, while the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported that a family of three from the rebel-controlled town of Sverdlovsk in Ukraine was among the victims.

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Nataliya Vasilyeva and Jim Heintz in Moscow and Adam Schreck in Dubai contributed to this report.

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A previous version of this story has been corrected to show that the aviation commission didn't say in its statement that U.S. experts were viewing the black boxes.