Civil aviation minister Praful Patil on Tuesday held a high-level meeting to review all aspects of setting up a Court of Inquiry into Saturday's Mangalore air crash that claimed 158 lives.

In the meeting, which was attended by civil aviation secretary M Madhavan Nambiar, director general of civil aviation S N A Zaidi, Air India CMD Arvind Jadhav and other top officials, legal and other aspects of the Court of Inquiry were discussed.

DGCA has already set up an Inspectorate of Inquiry which has taken possession of all vital equipment and materials of Boeing 737-800 from the crash site.

The black box or the digital flight data recorder (DFDR) found at the crash site was tonight brought to Delhi. The DFDR logs actual flight conditions, including altitude, airspeed, heading and vertical acceleration.

Earlier, officials said the process of analysing the Black Box and other vital components of the Air India aircraft got underway to ascertain the cause of the accident.

The Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and the Digital Flight Data Acquisition Unit (DFDAU), which record the conversation between the pilot and the Air Traffic Controller besides other sounds in the cockpit, were opened for preliminary analysis by officials of the Air Safety Directorate of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), official sources said.

Officials of various divisions of the DGCA, Air India's engineering department, aircraft manufacturer Boeing and other technical experts held a series of meetings during the day, the sources said.

Those present at the high-level meeting felt that the vital components like Black Box, CVR and the DFDAU should be opened by the Court of Inquiry when it is set up, sources said. Once the vital parts are opened, preliminary examination of these devices would take several weeks, they said.

Four teams of investigators from engineering, operations, ATC and aerodrome units, which inspected the wreckage, the runway and the accident site, would now pool in their resources to carry out their task further.

The Boeing 737-800 plane crashed at around 6.30 am last Saturday after the pilot overshot the runway at the Bajpe airport in Mangalore.