Survivors described hearing a loud thud shortly after touchdown and said the main fuselage broke into two parts which then filled with fire and choking smoke. The accident occurred shortly after 6:00am (0030 GMT) at the airport in the port city of Mangalore, around 320 kilometres (200 miles) west of the Karnataka state capital Bangalore. "The aircraft overshot the runway," Anup Shrivasta, Air India personnel director, told a news briefing in Mumbai.
"As far as the information available with us is concerned, eight persons were rescued and shifted to local hospitals," he said. A police official said one of the survivors, a seven-year-old boy, had later died from his injuries.
It was India's worst aviation disaster since 1996 when two passenger planes collided in mid-air near New Delhi with the loss of all 349 on board both flights. One survivor, Umer Farooq, told the NDTV news channel from his hospital bed that he had heard a loud bang as the plane touched down.
"Then the plane veered off toward some trees on the side and then the cabin filled with smoke. I got caught in some cables but managed to scramble out," said Farooq, who had burns to his arms, legs, and face. Television images from the immediate aftermath of the crash showed smoke billowing from the fuselage, as emergency crews, who had struggled down steep, wooded slopes to reach the aircraft, sought to douse the fire with foam.
Hours later, rescue workers were still pulling blackened bodies - some of them still strapped upright into their seats - from the remains of the burned out fuselage. Another survivor, K.P. Manikutty, said he was able to escape with only minor injuries.
"There was no warning to passengers about any trouble and it appeared to be a smooth landing," Manikutty told the Press Trust of India. "Immediately on touching the ground, the aircraft jerked and in a few moments hit something. Then it split in the middle and caught fire. I just jumped from the gap," he said.
The flight manifest said the 160 passengers - all of them Indian nationals - included 137 adults, nine children and four infants The pilot was identified as Z. Glusica, 53 - a British national of Serbian origin who had been flying with Air India for the past two years.
V.P. Agrawal, chairman of the Airport Authority of India, told reporters in New Delhi that there had been no distress call from the cockpit to suggest a technical fault. "The visibility was six kilometres when the aircraft approached the runway which was more than sufficient," Agrawal said.
Air India Express is subsidiary budget airline operated by the state-run carrier. The airport is located some 20 kilometres outside Mangalore. Many Indians from Karnataka and other southern states work in Gulf cities such as Dubai as construction workers, domestic staff and in other low-paid jobs.
They send much of their earnings back to India as remittances, and return to India for their annual leave. In a statement, US-based aircraft manufacturer Boeing said it was sending a team of investigators to India to help in the crash inquiry.
"Boeing wishes to express its profound condolences to the friends and family of those lost... as well as its wish for the recovery of those injured," it said on its website. The last major plane crash in India was in 2000, when 61 people were killed after a passenger plane crashed into a residential area near the eastern city of Patna.
Saturday's crash came as Air India is struggling to turn around its finances after posting a net loss of more than one billion dollars last year. The state carrier's once-dominant domestic market share has shrunk to 18 percent in the face of intense competition from private carriers since India liberalised its civil aviation market in the 1990s.