Two black boxes from the Thailand passenger jet that crashed on the resort island of Phuket killing 90 people have been found at the crash site, the airline and officials said yesterday. ?I can confirm that the two black boxes were found a few hours after the crash,?said Udom Tantiprasongchai, president of budget carrier One-Two-Go, which operated the doomed MD-82 plane. ?The two black boxes are in the hands of the investigators,? he said, referring to the Department of Aviation. Thai Transport Minister Thira Haocharoen told reporters that the two flight recorders would either be sent to the United States or Australia for analysis, with the results due within two weeks. ?The plane had been used for 12 years and normally, any plane could surely serve flights for at least 15 years,? he said. ?We have to admit that weather conditions were really bad, it is something beyond people?s control.?

One-Two-Go?s MD-82 passenger jet, carrying 123 mostly foreign passengers and seven crew members, skidded off the runway and burst into flames on Sunday afternoon while attempting to land in driving rain and heavy winds.

Aviation officials have blamed the accident on poor visibility and bad weather.

Rescue teams hampered by monsoon rains pulled the last bodies yesterday from the charred wreckage. Deputy Transport Minister Sansern Wongcha-um said the final death toll was 34 Thais and 55 foreigners, many of them European holidaymakers. The Indonesian captain and his Thai co-pilot were both killed, but 41 people survived a crash likely to raise more safety questions about the dozens of budget carriers that have sprung up across Asia in the last decade.

Five survivors were in critical condition, with burns to 60 percent of their bodies, hospital officials said. Fourteen Thais, seven Britons, five Iranians and four Germans were among those injured. The number of survivors was cut by one after a Scotsman was mistakenly included on the list.

Australia offered to help identify the victims, which so far are known to include four Americans, one French national and at least one Australian among the foreigners. There has been no word on the nationalities of the other dead.

?This process could take some time,? said Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, whose country?s police disaster team helped helped identify victims of the December 2004 tsunami, which killed 5,395 people in Thailand, more than 200 of them on Phuket. Flights to Phuket, dubbed the ?Pearl of the Andaman?, were cancelled or rerouted through Krabi, a smaller resort town about 185 km east of Thailand?s biggest island. Emergency workers were thus quick to retrieve the black box flight data recorders which would be sent to the United States for analysis, a process likely to take some time, officials said.

Much of the crash investigation was likely to focus on the weather as the plane, flown by Bangkok-based low-cost operator One-Two-Go, came in to land. The Bangkok Post newspaper quoted a senior aviation official as saying the pilot had told the control tower he was aborting the landing because he could not see the runway. Survivors spoke of torrential rain and trees bent over in the wind.

?The pilot tried to bring the plane back up. He started to turn right and made a sharp turn right and then the plane went into the embankment,? Millie Furlong, a 23-year-old waitress from Canada, told Reuters in hospital. ?I saw the grass and knew we were going to crash. It was very quick.?

Udom Tantiprasongchai, chairman of One-Two-Go parent company Orient Thai Airlines, said the pilot was experienced.