MANGALORE, India (AP) - Human error might have caused the crash of an Air India Boeing 737-800 plane that killed 158 people over the weekend, India's civil aviation minister said Monday.

Weather conditions and other factors at the time the plane reached its destination “looked absolutely normal for a regular touchdown and a safe landing,” Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel told the CNN-IBN television news channel.
Only an inquiry could establish what exactly went wrong as the aircraft overshot the hilltop runway and crashed and plunged over a cliff and into a ravine at dawn Saturday on the outskirts of the southern Indian city of Mangalore, he said.
Of the 166 passengers and crew aboard, only eight people survived the crash.
Investigators and aviation officials searched through the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 strewn across a hillside to try to determine the cause of India's worst air disaster in more than a decade. They recovered the cockpit voice recorder, which they hope will give them important clues, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.