WARSAW, Poland -- The cockpit crew of a crippled Polish jetliner radioed goodbye to their families and a terrified passenger scrawled a final note of fear before the plane crashed in a fireball, killing all aboard, officials said Sunday.
In Warsaw, 3,000 people prayed at Holy Cross Church for the 183 victims of the worst air disaster in Polish history. Movie theaters closed as Warsaw began two days of mourning.
A government commission began an investigation into Saturday's fiery crash of New York-bound LOT Airlines Flight 5055 as authorities considered burying the charred remains of the dead in a mass grave. Among the 183 people killed were 19 Americans and 19 Polish U.S. residents.
Investigators found a note written by a terrified passenger before the Soviet-built Ilyushin-62 plunged into a forest southeast of Warsaw 53 minutes after taking off from Warsaw's Okecie airport bound for New York.
'The failure of the plane. I don't know what will happen,' said the brief, disjointed note signed 'Domaradzka.' The note was written on a scrap of paper found near the wreckage.
An official at Okecie airport said the cockpit crew radioed farewells in the final moments before the jetliner slammed to Earth.
'All the crew members said goodbye to their families or relatives, knowing they will fail to land,' the official said. 'The captain was the last to say, 'That's the end -- goodbye -- we are falling down.''
The official news agency PAP said the plane's 'black box' -- the flight data recorder that preserves flight information such as heading, speed and altitude -- had been recovered and were being analyzed.
The commission also is listening to tapes of conversations between the plane's crew and the control tower at Okecie, as well as with other airports the pilot talked with during his ill-fated attempt to return to Warsaw, PAP said.
It was unclear why Capt. Zygmunt Pawlaczyk tried to return to Warsaw instead of making an emergency landing at a nearby air force field in Modlin after encountering engine trouble 30 minutes into the flight. State-run Polish radio said Saturday 'the failure of two engines' probably caused the crash and a witness said she saw flames from the engines seconds before it crashed.
Forensic experts said identification of the victims would be extremely difficult because the bodies were mutilated and burned when the plane crashed and cut a swath through a forest 4 miles from the end of Okecie's runway.
'Many bodies are still under the plane's fuselage,' said a forensic expert who refused to give his name.
Parts of bodies were brought Sunday to a facility in central Warsaw and the forensic expert said identification efforts would begin - possibly by midweek -- once all the human limbs were collected.
'Hands, legs, heads are being brought. We cannot speak about undamaged body trunks as such,' he said. 'Fingerprints will be checked and blood for identification purposes, but it will be possible only in a few cases.
'The government commission is considering whether the remains will be buried in one mass grave or if some, following partial identification, will be buried individually,' the forensic expert said.
At the scene of the crash, where investigators worked through the night, police tried to prevent crowds from seeing the tangled and charred wreckage of the Ilyushin-62, the sixth reported to have crashed since August 1972.
'The remains of the bodies started to decay in the sun and an odor is smelled around,' an investigator said Sunday.
In Washington, the State Department said Sunday that there were 19 U.S. citizens on the plane, as well as 19 Polish citizens who lived in the United States.
The disaster is the second recent crash of a LOT Ilyushin-62 to claim American lives. An Ilyushin flying from New York to Warsaw crashed outside the capital in March 1980 when it attempted an emergency landing, killing all 87 people on board, including 22 members and officials of a U.S. boxing team.
