E. German Authorities Seek Plane Crash Cause

EAST BERLIN — East Germany said experts are studying data from the flight recorder of a Soviet jetliner Saturday trying to find out why the plane crashed and burst into flames, killing 69 people aboard. Twelve survived.

The Aeroflot plane, a twin-engine, turbofan TU-134, crashed in dense fog Friday evening while approaching East Berlin’s Schoenefeld airport.

The aircraft came down in a wooded area nearly two miles from the airport, just outside the city limits and near a major highway. The impact tore the plane apart, and the wreckage burst into flames.

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in East Berlin said no Americans were aboard the flight, which originated in the Soviet city of Minsk, about 620 miles northeast of Berlin.

Transport Minister Otto Arndt said 60 East German passengers and one Austrian and all eight Soviet crew members were killed, the East German news agency ADN reported.

Arndt said the 12 survivors remained hospitalized.

Arndt told East German television that investigators found the “black box,” the plane’s flight data recorder, but had not yet determined the cause of the crash.

“At the time of the accident, Berlin’s Schoenefeld Airport was completely in operating order from the technical as well as the meteorological side,” ADN quoted Arndt as saying. “All the conditions for an orderly flight existed.”

But the West German newspaper Bild reported that in southern Berlin, where Schoenefeld is located, visibility was less than 100 feet because of thick fog.

ADN said about 400 people, including medical teams and aviation experts, were at the crash site Saturday to identify the bodies and pursue the investigation. The agency said Soviet aviation experts also were at the scene.