NEW DELHI, India ? An Air India flight from Dubai crashed Saturday morning in the city of Mangalore after apparently overshooting the runway, killing at least 160 people.

Televised images showed rescuers carrying limp bodies up a wooded slope and wreckage still burning hours after the crash, with bodies and the nearby ground covered with white foam emergency workers used to fight the blaze.

There were reportedly 166 passengers and crew on the Boeing 737-800 jet, which was believed to be 2 or 3 years old, a relatively new addition to the company’s fleet.

The rescue operation was complicated by rain and the topography: Flight IX-892 went down in a wooded valley about six miles from the runway.

The cause of the accident was not immediately known. An investigation was under way, and authorities were searching the debris field for the “black box” flight recorder.

Air traffic control reportedly received no distress message or other communication from the pilot suggesting the aircraft was having mechanical or operational problems. The pilot was reportedly a Russian expatriate, and the copilot was Indian.

The runway at the Mangalore airport is relatively short and has what’s known as a “tabletop” layout, with a flattened area carved out of mountainous terrain overlooking a valley, giving pilots a relatively small margin of error.

The airport, which opened to international flights four years ago, was shut down after the disaster, which occurred about 6:15 a.m. local time.

“This is a major calamity,” V.S. Acharya, home minister for the state of Karnataka, said to the CNN-IBN television network.

Six people who were pulled out alive were rushed to a government hospital with a burn unit, about 10 miles away. TV pictures showed a fireman carrying a body up a slope with difficulty, a colleague pushing him to help him ascend.

One survivor, Umer Farooq, said after being admitted to the hospital that “there was a loud noise, followed by fire.”

“I managed to jump out of a broken window,” he said.

TV images showed more than 15 fire trucks, 20 ambulances and 100 rescue workers standing at the periphery of the wreckage, with dense smoke billowing from the small valley and part of a mangled wing resting almost vertically on a slope.

The crash could be the deadliest in India since a November 1996 midair collision between a Saudi airliner and a Kazakh cargo plane near New Delhi that killed 349 people.