An airline official says only “external” factors could have caused the disintegration of a Russian passenger jet that crashed in Egypt.
“There are no technical failures that could lead to the plane braking up in the air,” Alexander Smirnov, Kogalymavia charter airline’s director of flights, said Monday in Moscow.
“The plane wasn’t flying, it was falling,” Smirnov said. “The crew totally lost control and for that reason there was not one attempt to get in contact and report on the accident situation onboard.”
Smirnov said the Metrojet charter flight “received significant damage to its construction that did not allow it to continue the flight.”
He said the only way to explain the crash is “some kind of external action . . . We rule out technical faultiness of the plane, we exclude a mistake by the pilot or the crew, the so-called human factor,” he said.
Investigation
Smirnov, while ruling out technical and human error as the cause of the crash, also stressed the importance of waiting for the findings of the investigation into the crash.
The Metrojet flight disappeared Saturday from radar over the Sinai peninsula with 224 people aboard.
Nearly all of the passengers aboard were Russian tourists returning to St. Petersburg from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. Three Ukrainians were also among the dead.
Emergency crews have recovered both of the plane’s black boxes, which record flight data and pilot communications.
Victim’s remains
Earlier Monday, the first bodies of victims of the Russian airplane crash in Egypt arrived at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport aboard a Russian government plane.
St. Petersburg authorities have decided mourning activities for those killed in the crash will last until Tuesday in Russia’s second city. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Sunday a national day of mourning.
After visiting the crash site, Russian member of the investigation team Viktor Sorochenko said fragments of the Airbus A321 “are strewn over a large area,” according to RIA-Novosti news agency in Cairo.
Several airlines, including Air France, Lufthansa, Dubai-based Emirates, and Qatar Airways have said they will stop flying over the Sinai peninsula for safety reasons.
IS claims responsibility
Militants claiming affiliation to the Islamic State said they shot down jet. But aviation and military experts believe the group does not have missiles that could have reached the plane’s altitude of 9,100 meters.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Sunday said the investigation into the crash “could take months.”
The aircraft went down roughly 100 kilometers south of the town of El-Arish, about 20 minutes after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh before dawn Saturday.
Egyptian Civil Aviation chief Hossam Kamal said safety checks before the flight did not turn up any problems and said the pilot did not issue an SOS before the plane disappeared.
