The aircraft was en route from Chicago and was due to fly on to West Palm Beach, Fla., after its Pittsburgh stop.
There were no survivors. In perhaps the only bit of redeeming news, there was word that few children were on the plane.
The crash of the Boeing 737 shortly after 7 p.m. Thursday was the second in little more than two months and the fifth in five years for the financially struggling airline. It was the nation's deadliest since 1987, when a Northwest Airlines crash killed 156 in Detroit.
Teams of forensic pathologists tagged and marked body parts during the day as families of the victims arrived at local hotels where clergy and mental- health workers gathered to console and counsel the grieving relatives.
Investigators who went to the scorched scene - reporters were barred - returned with solemn faces. Many said they were shocked not so much by bodies scattered across the muddy terrain, but by the fact that they had not seen one - not one - body that remained fully intact. The force of the crash was that violent.
Allegheny County Fire Marshal John Kaus, who was at the Branch Davidian
inferno in Waco, Texas, two years ago, said this was much worse. "We had corpses in Waco where you could identify that it had been a human corpse. We don't have that here."
Gov. Casey, who flew over the site by helicopter, said the scene "defies description." Of the victims' families, he said, "We share their sense of loss. I think the whole world is in mourning and feels deeply the loss."
Casey said President Clinton called him to assure him of the cooperation of U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena, who arrived at the scene early in the morning.
At an afternoon news conference at a nearby shopping-plaza parking lot, Pena said the investigation would take "quite some time. . . . We're all very much at a loss to explain this accident."
