Slovak military plane crashed into a snowy mountain in Hungary on Thursday night after taking the wrong flight path, killing 42 people, mostly peacekeepers returning from a NATO mission in Kosovo.
The sole survivor, a soldier, phoned his wife to raise the alarm just after the plane crashed in mid-evening and was in a stable condition in a hospital in Kosice, Slovakia.
"The plane diverted about three km (two miles) from the correct flight path, it was descending and preparing to land," Hungarian Defence Minister Ferenc Juhasz told a news conference on Friday.
Difficult terrain and freezing temperatures hampered efforts to reach the crash site 700 metres (2,300 feet) up in a forested, uninhabited mountain area, Hungarian officials said. The plane was 20 km from its destination, Kosice air base.
By 0900 GMT, 21 bodies had been recovered, Juhasz said, but the black box flight-recorder which could reveal the cause of the crash had not yet been found.
The Slovak Defence Ministry said the flight carried 28 soldiers on a regular troop rotation from KFOR, the peacekeeping force in Kosovo, as well as seven support staff and eight crew.
