Tishinskaya “was part of the family”, even though she no longer worked for Hillel, the group said.”Anya, you were incredibly talented, swift, fearless, sincere, kind and bright”. On Saturday evening, Air France-KLM and Emirates said they were following suit.
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The airline will instead use other routes to the region’s airports.
The Airbus A321, operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia, took off at 5:51 a.m. (0351 GMT) and disappeared from radar 23 minutes after taking off, the report said. No survivor has been reported from the crash.
The spokeswoman said that “security is our highest priority”. She spoke on condition of anonymity in line with department policy.
Egypt’s prime minister said a technical fault was the most likely cause, dismissing claims from Islamic State (IS) militants that they were responsible. The cause of the crash is not yet known. “We took the decision to avoid the area because the situation and the reasons for the crash were not clear”, said a Lufthansa spokesperson. The Egyptian resort city on the Sinai Peninsula is a favorite destination for Russian tourists.
An official from Egypt’s air control authority said the captain had complained that the communication equipment had failed – he was “aware of a problem”, according to experts.
Officers from Russia’s top investigative body raided the offices of Metrojet and Brisco on Saturday, searching the premises and questioning employees.
Pavel Moroz, a 30-year-old engineer from Moscow, arrived in Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday afternoon on a Metrojet flight.
“My wife was on that plane”, said Nail, a grief-stricken 60-year-old with tears in his eyes.
The “black box” flight recorder has already been recovered, suggesting that the investigation could be swift.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, has expressed sympathy to his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in a telephone call. The passengers included 214 Russians and three Ukrainians.
The Airbus-A321-200 crashed in a remote mountainous area 23 minutes after taking off from a popular Red Sea resort. The aircraft had accumulated a few 56,000 flight hours in almost 21,000 flights. The IS affiliate waging an insurgency in the Sinai claimed that “the soldiers of the caliphate succeeded in bringing down a Russian plane”.
According to Russian officials, 25 of those on board Flight KFL-9268 were children.
Two of the passengers on the Metrojet flight, Elena Rodina and Alexqander Krotov, were newlyweds, a friend of the couple told the Associated Press at a hotel near the airport. “And now she’s gone”. He told the BBC that the plane “started to drop very fast”, adding: “After about 20 seconds we lost the signal from this aircraft”.
“I am meeting my parents”, said 25-year-old Ella Smirnova, a tall young woman with a shock-induced smile on her face, waiting by Pulkovo’s information stand.
The Jewish student organization Hillel Russia mourned a former program director who died aboard a Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt.
Mahgoub said the aircraft had successfully undergone technical checks while at Sharm el-Sheikh’s airport. Russian news reports said the crash was the worst aviation disaster in Russian history. The youngest victim of the crash was believed to be 10 months old.
It said this was in revenge for Russian air strikes against IS in Syria.
Two air accident investigators from France – Airbus’s home country – are also to travel to Egypt along with six experts from the aerospace giant to help with the probe. There were seven crew members. “These nations must consider this as well as their relations with Egypt”, he said. Egyptian authorities say it crashed in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. Islamic State websites have in the past claimed responsibility for actions that have not been conclusively attributed to them. The Egyptian government has restricted journalists’ access to the area.
At Saint Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport, family members awaited news.
An authoritative Sweden-based aviation tracking service said the aircraft, having made an apparently smooth take off, lurched into a rapid descent shortly after approaching cruising altitude. At 7:14 Moscow time the crew was scheduled to make contact with…
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Beforehand, Egyptian air traffic control said it had lost contact with the civilian airliner carrying.
