Officials say a flight recorder from the Yemeni airliner that crashed near Comoros has been located in the ocean.
French and Yemeni officials say efforts to retrieve the so-called "black box" could begin later Wednesday.
The Yemenia Air flight, which originated in Paris, had 153 people on board when it crashed into the Indian Ocean in the pre-dawn hours Tuesday.
So far, rescuers say there is just one survivor -- 14-year old Bahia Bakari, who was traveling with her mother from France to visit family.
Her father, who says he talked to daughter by telephone, told French radio that she survived by clinging to a piece of debris until rescuers arrived.
He says she also heard people speaking after the crash, indicating that some other people may have initially survived.
France has mobilized military and civilian rescue teams in the hopes of finding more people alive.
Sixty-six French nationals were on the doomed flight. Yemeni officials have said there were also nationals from Yemen, Comoros, Canada, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, and the Philippines on board the Airbus 310.
The cause of the crash remains unclear. A Yemeni civil aviation spokesman, Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Kader, says winds were high at the time of the crash, and the plane was attempting to land in the middle of the night.
France's transport minister, Dominique Bussereau, says French inspectors detected a number of faults with the airplane during a 2007 inspection and that Yemenia Air was being subjected to closer inspections.
The Yemenia Air plane is the second Airbus plane to crash this month. An Air France Airbus A330, traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean June 1, killing all 228 people onboard.
Airbus says it is sending a team of specialists to the Comoros to help with the crash investigation.
The Comoros is made up of three islands about 300 kilometers northwest of Madagascar, in the Mozambique channel