COMO, Italy -- Rescue teams found the bodies of all 37 passengers and crew members of a small Italian airliner Friday on a rugged, tree-covered mountainside in northern Italy where the plane crashed in heavy rain and fog.
Investigators also recovered one 'black box' containing flight data and were searching for a second that recorded the pilots' conversation in the cockpit and with the ground.
The plane, an ATR-42 Hummingbird that ATI airlines, a subsidiary of the Italian airline Alitalia, put into service only in June, took off from Milan's Linate Airport for Cologne, West Germany, Thursday evening carrying 34 passengers -- 29 Germans and five Italians -- and a crew of three.
'We are in a state of emergency,' Commander Lamberto Laine, 43, radioed Milan 16 minutes after takeoff. Then the radio went dead and the plane disappeared from radar screens.
Flight controllers reported the ATI's two-engine prop-jet was approaching its cruising altitude of 15,000 feet when it suddenly plunged 5,250 feet in 30 seconds, and the pilot radioed the emergency.
'Something very traumatic had to have happened to make it go straight down vertically,' said Deputy Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, who reported to the Cabinet on the crash.
Alpine rescue teams found the crash site Friday morning after an all-night search by flashlight in driving rain.
The wreckage was in a gully covered with chestnut trees 2,600 feet up Mount Crezzo in the Alps between the two southern prongs of Lake Como, about 30 miles north of Milan.
'It looked like a macabre rubbish dump,' one searcher said. 'There were parts of human bodies, wreckage of the plane, papers, a small card with a map of the Milan Trade Fair and ties, so many ties it seemed impossible, hanging from tree branches.'
A reporter for Italian RAI television said the size of wreckage made it appear that the plane had 'virtually disintegrated.' There also was no clear point of impact at the site.
Investigators refused to speculate on whether the plane had exploded in the air.
Transport Minister Cologero Mannino, who went to the site, said there were 'unusual elements' in the crash. 'We have had previous cases on takeoff or landing but here we have an incident during flight, which is harder to interpret,' he said.
Other pilots reported icing conditions at the time.
It was the first crash of a commercial airliner in Italy since July 27, 1980, when a Itavia DC-9 exploded over the Tyrrhenian on a flight from Bologna to Palermo for causes that still remain a mystery. Eighty-one people died.
It was Western Europe's most serious aviation disaster since Aug. 22, 1985, when a chartered British Airtours Boeing 737 burst into flames and burned before takeoff in Manchester, England, killing 55 of the 137 people aboard.
