INDIAN OFFICIALS COMPILE CLUES IN CRASH.

Byline: Daily News Wire Services

As scores of bereaved relatives and friends wandered through twin crash sites on the dusty Indian plain, struggling to absorb the tragedy, Indian officials Wednesday began reconstructing what caused the worst midair collision in aviation history.

Among the suspects in the collision Tuesday night, which killed all 349 people aboard a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 and a Kazakh airliner, are the air-traffic controllers at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, where the Kazakh plane was headed and the Saudi plane had just left.

But Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, who spent 20 minutes Wednesday walking grim faced through the charred wreckage of the Saudi plane, said that an inquiry ordered by the government within hours of the crash would not be blunted by any cover-up of the kind detected by critics of some previous Indian air-accident inquiries.

``We will spare nobody,'' he said.

Kazakh officials revised the number of people aboard the Kazakh plane, reducing the death toll that was announced Tuesday night by two, to 349. The revised list also showed that three Americans, not two, were aboard the Saudi plane. At the State Department in Washington, officials said that the names of the American victims were being withheld pending notification of their families.

The revised toll made the accident the fourth worst in aviation history, and left Indians, and all who fly into India's airports, with pressing questions about the causes of the collision and the role, if any, that was played by lapses on the part of India's air-traffic control system or the two flight crews.

A major step toward finding answers was taken Wednesday morning when recovery teams announced that they had found the flight data recorders, or so-called black boxes, from both planes, as well as the cockpit voice recorder from the Kazakh aircraft.

Indian aviation officials said the recoveries meant that they should be able to reconstruct everything about the flights of the two planes that could have caused the collision.

The country's top civil-aviation officials appeared to have gone at least part way to vindicating the air-traffic controllers by calling a news conference and making public a transcript of the last exchanges the controller had with the two pilots.

As the Kazakh cargo plane flew head-on toward a Saudi jetliner, controllers told its pilot to watch out for the 747 in the clouds ahead. The pilot asked how close it was.

``Fourteen miles,'' a controller said.

Seconds later: ``Thirteen miles.''

The pilot's acknowledgment of that message was the last word flight controllers had from either aircraft before they hit and spun to earth in spectacular twin fireballs.

The exchanges, in transcripts released Wednesday, indicate the planes did not see each other in time and hint that the pilots were misled by their instruments or misunderstood the tower's directions. They were supposed to pass with a 1,000-foot difference in altitude - instructions that the Saudi plane's pilots never confirmed, the transcripts show.

Because landings and takeoffs at the New Delhi airport are made along the same flight corridor, the two planes were in effect heading toward each other on the same aerial highway, though supposedly at different altitudes.

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Photo

Photo: Workers in Charkhi Dadri, India, on Wednesday recover a body from the wreckage of two planes which collided in midair Tuesday, killing 349.

Associated Press