Russian emergency ministry officers wait to unload the bodies of victims of a Russian airliner, which crashed in Egypt ” s Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, at Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg, Russia November 2, 2015.
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He added that the crew did not issue any warnings or communications during the final moments, indicating that the flight crew must have been disabled and not able to radio out.
Local security officials say a video posted by an IS-affiliated group over the weekend which showed footage of a plane plummeting from the air was not related to Sinai, but was in fact a flight in Pakistan. There had been no distress call or contact with air traffic control in the run-up to the crash, he said.
On Sunday, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said that it is too soon to tell what caused the Russian plane crash, adding that an “extensive and complicated technical study” is due. Several airlines, including Emirates, Lufthansa and Air France-KLM have nevertheless said they will not fly over the area until reasons for the crash are clear.
The bodies of 144 of the victims arrived in St. Petersburg Monday.
In this photo released by the Prime Minister’s office, Sherif Ismail, right, looks at the remains of a crashed passenger jet in Hassana, Egypt on Saturday, October 31, 2015.
All 224 people on board died, all but five of them Russian.
With no indication that those events played a role in the crash, Todd Curtis, a former safety engineer with Boeing, said investigators will be looking at more unusual events, such as an on-board fire or corrosion that caused a structural failure. US intelligence officials have claimed the plane was hit by a Russian-made Buk SA-11 SAMS operated by pro-Russia insurgents in Eastern Ukraine – a claim Moscow has denied.
He dismissed the possibility that decompression alone would have caused the crash.
President Vladimir Putin described the crash as a “huge tragedy” in his first comments on the disaster at a meeting with the country’s transport minister Monday, Russian news agencies reported.
Hours after the disaster, the Islamic State (Isis) claimed it had downed the plane in response to Russia’s military intervention in Syria.
Investigators have so far refrained from naming the cause of the crash but Metrojet, the Russian company operating the plane, on Monday ruled out technical faults or pilot error as a cause of the crash.
The black boxes of the aircraft have already been found and their contents are being analyzed to determine the cause of the mishap. The company’s executive Smirnov said the firm had ruled out a technical fault or human error and said the plane had sustained “significant damage to its construction that did not allow it to continue the flight”.
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Russian Federation has sent over 100 emergency workers and aviation experts to help Egypt examine the crash site in the Sinai Peninsula.
