MANGALORE, India (Reuters) – An Air India Express  airliner crashed and burst into flames outside an airport in  southern India yesterday, killing 158 people, many thought to  be Indian migrant workers returning home from Dubai.

The Boeing 737-800 appeared to skid off the table-top runway  in rain at Mangalore airport in Karnataka state and plunged into  forest below, Air India director Anup Srivastava said.

Eight people survived from among 166 passengers and crew on  on board, he said.

All 158 bodies had been recovered, Ajay Kumar Singh, a  senior Karnataka police official, told reporters. “We had no hope to survive, but we survived,” Pradeep, an  Indian technician working in Dubai, told local television.

“The plane broke into two and we jumped off the plane. As  soon as the plane landed, within seconds this happened.”

Local television showed a fireman carrying what seemed to be  the remains of a child from the smoking wreckage. Charred bodies  lay in the forested terrain. All the passengers were Indian nationals, an Air India  official said. Many were likely to be Indian migrant workers in  Dubai, the rich Gulf emirate which employs thousands of men  and women for poorer Asian countries, often to fill lowly jobs.

The pilot was a British national of Serbian origin, Indian  TV channels reported, and was said to be very experienced.

Air India Express is the budget arm of the loss-ridden  state-run carrier Air India, which has been fending off growing  competition from private airlines.

The flight’s black box has been recovered, the United Arab  Emirates state news agency WAM said. Air India official Nambiar  said the search for the flight data recorder was still going on.

The crash appeared to be an accident, Indian officials said.  One TV report said the plane hit a radar pole on landing.    “There was no distress indication from the pilot. That means  between the pilot and the airport communication there was no  indication of any problem,” VP Agarwal, director of Airports  Authority of India, told local television.

Indian officials said the plane crashed around 6 am (0030  GMT). TV images showed it struck a forested area, and flames  blazed from the wreckage as rescue workers fought to bring the  fire under control.

“While landing at the airport, the plane deviated and hit  something,” said Krishna, another survivor. “It caught fire and  we fell out. We looked up and saw some opening and came out  through that route.”

Asked if human error was behind the crash, India’s Civil  Aviation Minister Praful Patel said there were no indications of  any trouble during the plane’s landing.

“All other parameters like the aircraft functions and the  runway looked to be very normal, so it should have been a normal  landing,” he said. “But I do not want to speculate on the  cause.”

India has seen a boom in private carriers due to growing  demand from India’s middle class. It was the first big crash in  more than a decade but a series of near misses at airports,  including Delhi and Mumbai, have caused concern India’s creaking  infrastructure was failing to keep pace with an economic boom.

Indian Law Minister Veerappa Moily told CNN-IBN TV that he  had opened a new runway at Mangalore airport just 10 days ago.

The ill-fated Air India airliner was two years old. Boeing  said in a statement it was sending a team to provide technical  assistance to the crash investigation.

The last major crash in India was in July 2000 when an  Alliance Air Boeing 737-200 crashed into a residential area  during a second landing attempt in the eastern city of Patna,  killing at least 50 people.

With growing competition from private carriers, the Indian  government agreed to inject $1.1 billion into Air India if the  ailing state-run carrier came up with the same amount in cost  cuts and extra revenue.