Egyptian Military cars approach the plane’s tail at the wreckage of the passenger jet bound for St Petersburg in Russian Federation.
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Aviation analysts are now leaning toward an in-flight explosion after satellite imagery reportedly picked up a heat flash at the point where the Airbus A-321 crashed. Egypt said the plane was carrying 196 bodies.
The plane had previously been leased to Saudi Arabian Airlines and Lebanon’s national Middle East Airlines (MEA) carrier.
He says the plane’s cockpit voice recorder could not be immediately evaluated because of damage to it, but investigators were working on it again Wednesday. The damage took three months to fix, but the jet was certified as airworthy this year by regulators in Ireland, where it was registered.
The Airbus A321-200 was built in 1997. The council president of the worldwide Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has expressed the agency’s deepest regret and sorrow for the families and friends of the victims of the Russian plane crash in Egypt.
The experts hope the examination of the recorded onboard conversations as well as flight data will help provide clues as to what caused the crash.
Russian officials have refrained from announcing the cause of the crash, citing the ongoing investigation.
But officials in Cairo say there was no evidence to support claims by Russian officials that the airliner “broke up in the air”.
At least 25 children were on the plane.
An Egyptian doctor who examined around half of the 224 bodies said that about one in five of the corpses had been badly burned in the moments before death. The first body has been released for a funeral. Though officials have confirmed that no distress call was received, suggesting a sudden breakup to many experts. In the case of an emergency while in flight, pilots are trained to give priority to flying the plane and addressing the situation before communicating with air traffic controllers.
A U.S. intelligence analysis has ruled out a missile strike, as claimed by a militant group affiliated with Islamic State, CNN reported.
The infrared activity that was detected could mean many things, including a bomb blast or that an engine on the plane exploded due to a malfunction.
Russia’s transport minister, Maxim Sokolov, said Tuesday that Russian experts already had conducted a preliminary inspection of the two flight recorders, commonly known as “black boxes”, and had seen information from Egypt’s flight-control radars. “This could be a long process and we can’t talk about the results as we go along”, Mr Rahmi told Reuters news agency.
Russian officials have said it’s too early to jump to that conclusion.
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Russian Federation said it hoped its crews would complete their search mission at the remote location on Monday evening, where so far investigators have found 12 segments of the plane’s fuselage.
