Investigators have recovered the black boxes of a plane that crashed in southern India's Kerala state on Friday, killing at least 18 people, including the two pilots.

Video filmed on Saturday shows the wreckage of the Air India plane, which broke into two.

The area had been slammed by torrential rains since Thursday.

In a significant development, the black box or the flight data recorders of the Air India Express flight that broke into pieces after it skidded off a tabletop runway amid heavy rain at Kerala’s Kozhikode airport late on Friday evening have been found on Saturday morning.

The recorders -- a Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) and a Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) -- store crucial information about a plane’s altitude, position and speed, as well as records of conversations between the pilots, and are critical in helping aviation investigators understand what happened to the flight.

Meanwhile, the investigating officers from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) on Saturday morning started their probe into the crash. Eighteen people, including the two pilots, died in the accident.

The pilots, one of them a decorated former fighter pilot, had aborted two landings due to tailwind and had circled the airport several times before the final landing. The area had been slammed by torrential rains since Thursday.