Plans were under way to retrieve the boxes within days, an official from Yemen said.

A 12-year-old girl, Bahia Bakari, who clung to debris for up to 13 hours, is the only known survivor of Tuesday's crash, which killed 152 people flying from Paris to Moroni, the capital of the Comoros, via Yemen's capital, San'a.

The chief of Yemen's Civil Aviation Authority, Hamed Ahmad Faraj, had only grim news yesterday, saying that search planes had spotted another body floating in the water.

The Airbus A310's flight data and cockpit recorders inside the black boxes are critical to help investigators understand why the flight went down, but the one-line statement from the French investigation agency BEA gave no indication when they might be recovered.

However, Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, spokesman for Yemen's Supreme Committee on Civil Aviation Accidents, said search teams were working on plans to retrieve the black boxes within the next few days. Faraj said the French were bringing in special equipment from Djibouti to help. French defense officials in Paris had no immediate comment.

A team of Yemeni divers left yesterday for Moroni. French navy divers also were on the scene. Earlier, Yemeni officials said divers had recovered some pieces of the plane's fuselage.

Yemenia Flight 626 crashed while preparing to land off the northern end of the main island of Comoros, an archipelago of three main islands 1,800 miles south of Yemen, between Africa's southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar. Heavy winds were reported at the time of the accident.

Faraj said communications between the Moroni airport tower and the plane's pilot did not contain any hint that the plane was in trouble.