Russian
officials on Monday reiterated that it is too early to know what caused
a passenger jet to break apart and crash in Egypt this week,
challenging an earlier comment from an airline executive who ruled out
technical or mechanical problems.
Kogalymavia
airline official Alexander Smirnov told reporters in Moscow that the
protection systems on the plane would have prevented it from crashing,
even if there were major errors in the pilot's control equipment.
"Therefore
the only reason that could explain the plane's breaking up in the
midair can be a certain impact, purely mechanical (and/or) physical
impact on (the) flying vessel," he said.
The
vague comment made translation difficult, with some interpreting that
the executive said an "external influence" caused the crash.
The head of the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency, however, quickly pushed back.
"It
is completely premature to speak about the reasons of this, as there
are not grounds. And I'd like to call on the aviation community to
refrain from any premature conclusions," Transport Agency chief
Alexander Neradko told the
state-run Russian news agency Sputniknews.com.
Experts
agree it is too early to know for certain what caused the plane to
break up at the start of what could be a lengthy investigation. CNN
aviation correspondent Richard Quest suggested that the Kogalymavia
official could have meant something abnormal and out of the ordinary had
occurred.
However, Smirnov said that
while the plane's flight and voice data recorders had been recovered,
they had not been read or decoded. Officials
have played down an apparent claim by Islamic militants in Sinai that
they brought down the Airbus A321-200, saying technical failure is the
most likely reason for the crash.
Here's where things stand:
THE FLIGHT
Flight
9268 was on its way from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to St.
Petersburg early Saturday when it dropped off radar about 23 minutes
into the flight, Egyptian officials say.
Air
traffic controllers apparently didn't receive any distress calls from
the pilots. "There was nothing abnormal before the plane crash,"
Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamel said Saturday. "It
suddenly disappeared from the radar."
CNN's Quest said it was "unusual" for an aircraft to go down roughly 20 minutes into a flight.
"At
this point, a plane is on autopilot. It's reaching its initial cruising
altitude, and there is little that can or should go wrong," he wrote in
an analysis.
But the website Flightradar24, which tracks aircraft around the world,
said it had received data from the Russian plane suggesting sharp changes in altitude and a dramatic decrease in ground speed before the signal was lost.
"It's
disturbing to me. It indicates to me that something occurred possibly
in the way of aerodynamic stall. I mean, an airplane just cannot fly at
those lower speeds," said CNN aviation analyst Les Abend, although he
cautioned that the Flightradar information was very preliminary.
THE CRASH
"Disintegration
of the fuselage took place in the air, and the fragments are scattered
around a large area" covering about 20 square kilometers (8 square
miles), Viktor Sorochenko, executive director of Russia's Interstate
Aviation Committee, told reporters Sunday.
Learning
that the plane broke into pieces while in the air helps reduce the list
of possible causes of the crash, but there are still plenty of
scenarios, said CNN aviation analyst Peter Goelz.
"It
narrows it down a little bit, but there are a number of issues that
could have affected this plane," said Goelz, a former managing director
of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB. "And
terrorism has not been ruled out."
He
suggested the disaster could have resulted from "some sort of
catastrophic failure, perhaps caused by an earlier maintenance problem.
It could have been a center fuel tank that might have exploded."
Former
NTSB investigator Alan Diehl told CNN he believes the "final
destruction" of the plane could have been from "aerodynamic forces or
some other type of G-forces."
Investigators
are expected to get a clearer idea of what happened to the aircraft
from its flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- devices commonly
known as black boxes -- both of which have been recovered, according to
authorities.
THE PLANE
The
Airbus A321-200 operated by the airline Kogalymavia passed a routine
inspection before takeoff, Egyptian Airports Co. chief Adel Al-Mahjoob
said Saturday.
According to
the Aviation Safety Network,
which tracks aircraft incidents, the same plane's tail struck a runway
while landing in Cairo in 2001 and required repair. At the time, the
aircraft was registered to the Lebanese carrier Middle East Airlines,
registration records show.
Kogalymavia's
Andrei Averyanov confirmed to reporters Monday that the plane had been
damaged in 2001 but said it had most recently been thoroughly checked
for cracks in 2013. Not enough time had passed for major cracks to
develop to a critical size since then, he said.
The
ex-wife of the plane's copilot, Sergei Trukhachev, said over the
weekend that he had told his daughter he was concerned about the
condition of the plane. "Our daughter had a telephone chat with him just
before the flight," Natalya Trukhacheva told Russia's state-run NTV.
"He complained before the flight that one could wish for better
technical condition of the plane."
But a Kogalymavia said such reports were irresponsible and that there was no record of the pilot or crew making any complaints.
Executive Smirnov said that he had personally flown the plane in recent months and that it was "pristine."
The
A321-200 was built in 1997, and Kogalymavia, which is also known as
Metrojet, had been operating it since 2012, Airbus said in a statement.
The aircraft had clocked around 56,000 flight hours over the course of
nearly 21,000 flights, the plane maker said.
The
Irish Aviation Authority said that the plane was registered in Ireland
to Wilmington Trust SP Services (Dublin) Ltd, which leased the aircraft
to Kogalymavia.
"As an Irish registered
aircraft, in April/May 2015, the Irish Aviation Authority (IAA)
conducted an annual review of the aircraft certifications in support of
its annual Certificate of Airworthiness renewal process and all
certifications were satisfactory at that point in time," it said.
THE VICTIMS
There were
217 passengers and seven crew members
on board Flight 9268. Of the passengers, 209 were Russian, four were
Ukrainian and one was Belarussian. The citizenships of three other
passengers are unknown.
Egyptian medics have retrieved 175 bodies from the scene, a medical source in Sinai told CNN on Monday.
Most of the bodies retrieved are intact, the source said.
About 60% to 70% percent of the bodies have an intact core, with some having dismembered limbs, the source added.
"There
are no major burns," the source told CNN. The source believes the rest
of the bodies on site now are not intact, and this why they would take
longer to retrieve.
The photo of 10-month-old Darina Gromova posted by the baby's mother before a family trip to Egypt.
Twenty-five
children were among the victims, including 10-month old Darina Gromova,
who is shown in a photo posted on social media by her mother on October
15 at the start of the family's trip to Egypt. In the photo, Darina is
looking out a window at planes on the tarmac of Pulkovo Airport in St.
Petersburg.
Russian media reported that
the disaster created a large number of orphans in Russia, as a lot of
parents left their young children with relatives while they took
vacations in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Early
Monday, a Russian plane carrying the remains of 144 of the crash victims
landed in St. Petersburg, Russia's state-run news agency RIA Novosti
reported.
Another plane bringing more bodies is expected to depart Egypt later Monday.
Russian
President Vladimir Putin met with his country's transport minister
Monday to discuss the investigation and again expressed his condolences
to the victims' families.
"This is a terrible tragedy and we are most certainly with you at this time with all our hearts and souls," Putin said,
according to a Kremlin transcript of their meeting.
"I
want to thank the people of St. Petersburg for the way they have
responded. The whole country has seen this, everyone in Russia, and I
want to thank you for your words of sympathy and condolence. In such
tragic hours, it is certainly very important to feel the support of
those close to you and know you have the entire country's sympathy over
this terrible disaster."
THE INVESTIGATION
Egyptian
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday urged the public not to jump
to conclusions. "These are complicated matters that require advanced
technologies and wide investigations that might go on for months," he
said.
Al-Sisi
has promised Putin that he will allow "the broadest possible
participation of Russian experts in the investigation," according to the
Kremlin, and Russian officials have joined their Egyptian counterparts
at the crash scene. Putin has also ordered Russian Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev to open an investigation into the crash, the Kremlin said.
Aviation
investigators from France and Germany, the countries where the plane
was manufactured, are also taking part in the inquiry.
Egyptian officials said Saturday that the two "black boxes" were being transported to Cairo for analysis.
The
flight data recorder stores a vast array of information about the
flight, such as air speed, altitude, engine performance and wing
positions. The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds on the flight deck
that can include conversations between the pilots and warning noises
from the aircraft.
Russia's state-run
official TASS news agency reported Monday that the "black boxes" had
been inspected by top Russian officials and were said to be in a good
condition.
Egypt's Ministry of Civil Aviation later released a photo of one of the boxes.
Photo released by Egypt's Ministry of Civil Aviation.
THE REGION
In
recent years, the Sinai Peninsula has been a battleground between
ISIS-affiliated militants and Egyptian security forces. The vicious
conflict has killed hundreds of people.
The
militants appeared to claim responsibility for bringing down the
Russian passenger jet in a statement posted online Saturday, but
officials in Egypt and Russia disputed it.
Mahjoob,
the airport official, said there was no evidence of a terrorist attack.
And Russian Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov said the claim that
terrorists brought down the plane with an anti-aircraft missile "cannot
be considered reliable," according to RIA Novosti.
The
Egyptian military said militants in Sinai have shoulder-fired
anti-aircraft weapons that shoot only as high as 14,000 feet, far short
of the more than 30,000 feet at which Flight 9268 was flying when it
dropped off radar.
To reach such an
altitude would require missiles using special launch pads and radar
systems operated by engineers, the military said.
Kremlin
spokesman Dimitry Peskov refused to discount terrorism, telling CNN's
Matthew Chance on Monday that "only (the) investigation can rule out
something."
Kogalymavia executives also
said Monday that it was too early in the investigation to speculate or
draw any conclusions. But Smirnov referred to purported footage of the
crash posted by militants, saying: "Those images you have seen on the
Internet, I think they are fake."
CNN's
Sara Sirgany, Mariano Castillo, Catherine Shoichet, Nic Robertson, Alla
Eschenko, Alexander Felton, Arwa Damon, Nancy Leung and Radina Gigova
contributed to this report.
