Mangalore, India (CNN) — Searchers on Sunday combed through the charred wreckage of the Air India plane that crashed in southern India, looking for the flight data recorder.
The recorder –commonly known as the « black box » — will allow authorities to piece together the flight’s last minutes.

Some clues to what happened could come from the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, which was recoveredSunday, the civil aviation ministry said. The device had suffered some fire damage, but it is expected to yield information, the agency said.

It could take two weeks to analyze the information onthe cockpit voice recorder, the ministry said.
Of the 158 people who perished when the plane crashed in Mangalore on Saturday, 128 bodies have been identified and handed over to relatives, said AirIndia chief Arvind Jadhav. Experts have been called in to conduct DNA tests on the remaining badly burned bodies to determine their identity, he said at a news conference Sunday.

The Air India chiefhailed the role of local villagers in Mangalore, who he said helped save lives after the plane crashed.

Only eight of the 166 people on board Air India Flight IX-812 survived the crash and weretaken to hospitals.

Air India spokesman K. Swaminathan said about 30 to 40 relatives of the crash victims have been flown into India from the United Arab Emirates in two separate flights.

At themortuary in Mangalore, family members waited for hours for authorities to let them in and identify the victims. But with many burned beyond recognition, loud speakers urged relatives to donate DNAsamples to make the identification process possible.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board announced Saturday that it will send a team to India to assist in the investigation.

S.N.A. Zaidi,the head of India’s civil aviation regulator, told CNN Sunday that the investigation could take months to determine the cause.

The Boeing 737 took off from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and…