Senior officials at Metrojet, the charter airline company whose Airbus passenger plane crashed in Egypt over the weekend and killed all 224 people aboard on Monday ruled out any technical failure or human error on the part of the airline in the catastrophe.
“We absolutely exclude the technical failure of the plane, and we absolutely exclude pilot error or a human factor,” Aleksandr A. Smirnov, a former pilot and the airline’s deputy director for aviation, said at a packed news conference in Moscow.
Mr. Smirnov said that the crash could have been caused by “an external impact on the plane,” although he did not endorse the theory of a terrorist attack either, saying that the investigation would have to determine the cause.
Company officials used only assertive statements to support their position, and they did not provide any documentation to back up their claim that both the plane and its personnel were in top flying condition.
The news conference came as the remains of 144 victims were flown overnight to St. Petersburg from Cairo, their bodies taken from a Russian aircraft to the main morgue in a long white truck. More remains were due to arrive from Egypt later Monday.
Morgue officials began working to identify the victims with the help of DNA samples and relatives.
President Vladimir V. Putin, who established an investigative committee after the crash, spoke for the first time about the accident on Monday, calling it a “huge tragedy.”
In a meeting with Maxim Sokolov, the minister of transportation who had just returned from Egypt, the president repeated his call for a “thorough inquiry.”
A senior Russian aviation official said that Egypt was keeping tight control over data from the flight recorders and other instruments. Investigators from Russia and elsewhere in Europe, where the Airbus was manufactured, flew to Egypt to assist in the inquiry.
“The Egyptian commission is conducting the investigation, and is giving no records and transcripts, be it of the flight recorders or on-ground recorders or radar data, to anyone,” Alexander Neradko, the head of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency, said on the Rossiya-24 news channel. The commission had yet to begin sifting through the data, he said.
The Metrojet officials said that the pilots gave no indication that the plane was in trouble and did not send any type of distress call.
The plane’s speed dropped to about 186 miles per hour and fell about 5,000 feet one minute before it crashed, Mr. Smirnov said, adding that the brief irregular flight path probably indicated that the pilots were struggling to control the Airbus 321-200.
He suggested that the sudden decompression of the plane as it broke apart likely incapacitated all on board immediately.
Aviation experts expressed disbelief that airline officials presented such strong assertions ruling out technical or human error even as the investigation was barely starting.
“I am surprised that an airline manager, at the point that we are at in this investigation, would make a statement like that,” said Robert T. Francis, a former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board in the United States.
“Without the flight recorders having been read, and without more investigation of the fuselage, which is spread all over the place, I don’t think you can rule out anything.”
At the news conference, the airline, founded as Kogalymavia but flying under the name Metrojet, rejected criticism that the airplane was too old to fly. It also rejected the possibility that a tail strike in 2001 during a landing in Cairo, when the aircraft was operated by a different airline, might have left fatal structural flaws.
Andrei B. Averianov, Metrojet’s deputy director for engineering, ruled out both as possible factors during the hourlong news conference at the company’s headquarters in an office park in Moscow.
The 18-year-old Airbus A321-200 had flown just under 60,000 hours of its 120,000-hour life span, he said, adding that was not an “extraordinary” age compared to other European and Russian fleets. He also dismissed the tail strike as an issue.
“I am absolutely confident that this incident could not be the reason for what has happened because the plane was repaired by its manufacturer,” Mr. Averianov said, “Airbus has developed special technology for such repairs which guarantees the usage of such an airplane.”
He said the tail was checked every 24 months and any cracks or metal fatigue would have been discovered because such cracks develop slowly.
There have been at least two previous cases in which airplanes broke apart long after similar tail repairs were done.
A China Airlines Boeing 747 en route to Hong Kong from Taiwan in May 2002 broke into several pieces as it was climbing to 35,000 feet, killing all 225 people on board. The repairs made 22 years earlier on the tail failed, causing a sudden and explosive decompression, according to the analysis by the Taiwanese government.
A Japan Airlines 747 suffered a similar failure in 1985, seven years after a tail strike had been repaired. The crew struggled to control the plane for some 46 minutes after takeoff before it crashed, killing all but four of the 524 people on board.
Responding to accusations that the co-pilot had complained to his family about the technical state of the plane soon before the plane left, Mr. Averianov said there were no recent remarks in the logbook, and he said that the plane departed on schedule from Sharm el-Sheikh, indicating it had not been held up by technical issues.
The airplane officials said they had provided documents to the Investigate Committee, which is looking into any possible negligence of Russian law, to bolster its case.
But he repeated what senior transportation officials said a day earlier: The widely scattered debris field, almost 8 square miles, indicated that the plane had broken apart at a great height.
The Metrojet official was also dismissive about the claim by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, that it brought down the plane. “Judging by the video they put out, it seems that it is fake,” Mr. Smirnov said, referring to a blurry clip that that purported to show a missile strike on a plane that then erupts in a cloud of black smoke.
But other analysts have not discounted the possibility that a bomb was brought on board or stowed in the luggage. A bomb in the hold of a Pan Am Boeing 747 en route to New York from London exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, bringing down the plane in a terrorist attack that was attributed to Libya.
Russia has fought a long-running Islamic insurgency in Chechnya, where two women armed with hand grenades destroyed two separate domestic flights in 2004.
More important, Russia recently deployed its armed forces in Syria to defend the rule of President Bashar al-Assad and to attack his opponents, including the Islamic State. That prompted calls for a global jihad against Russia.
The company said about 20 people had canceled their trips to Egypt immediately after the crash and were fully compensated, but that passengers were not abandoning trips in large numbers.
In St. Petersburg, where most of the passengers had lived, forensic medical experts began on Sunday the process of identifying bodies after a first cargo airplane from Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations carrying human remains arrived in the city overnight.
Footage released by the ministry showed the cargo plane returning to Pulkovo Airport, where the vacationers had been scheduled to arrive on Saturday, landing in a light rain. A motorcade brought the bodies to the morgue.
Some bodies would be shown to relatives at a city morgue, and by midday, 15 had been readied for identification, the ministry said.
Relatives waited in a hotel near the airport for word of when they would be called to the morgue. Larisa Y. Pulyanova and Anatoly L. Pulyanov waited to identify their only son, Roman A. Pulyanov, 29, who had been on vacation with his girlfriend.
Tears welling in her eyes, Ms. Pulyanova remembered her son as “young and tall and handsome.”
He had picked out Egypt, she said, because it was affordable at a price of 36,000 rubles, or $560, for two people for a week, and the couple did not want to spend more as they were saving money for their wedding.
“The saddest is that he was our only son,” she said.
Mr. Pulyanov said either terrorism or a mechanical problem appeared to be probable causes of the crash. He was too bereaved to be angry at anyone at the moment, he said.
Even if it were proven to be an act of terrorism related to Russia’s military action in Syria, he said, that would only justify the Kremlin’s decision to fight the Islamic State.
“But what difference does it make, I don’t have a son,” he said. “Now, that is how I feel. Maybe in a week, I will gather my thoughts and look at things differently.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/w...n-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
“We absolutely exclude the technical failure of the plane, and we absolutely exclude pilot error or a human factor,” Aleksandr A. Smirnov, a former pilot and the airline’s deputy director for aviation, said at a packed news conference in Moscow.
Mr. Smirnov said that the crash could have been caused by “an external impact on the plane,” although he did not endorse the theory of a terrorist attack either, saying that the investigation would have to determine the cause.
Company officials used only assertive statements to support their position, and they did not provide any documentation to back up their claim that both the plane and its personnel were in top flying condition.
The news conference came as the remains of 144 victims were flown overnight to St. Petersburg from Cairo, their bodies taken from a Russian aircraft to the main morgue in a long white truck. More remains were due to arrive from Egypt later Monday.
Morgue officials began working to identify the victims with the help of DNA samples and relatives.
President Vladimir V. Putin, who established an investigative committee after the crash, spoke for the first time about the accident on Monday, calling it a “huge tragedy.”
In a meeting with Maxim Sokolov, the minister of transportation who had just returned from Egypt, the president repeated his call for a “thorough inquiry.”
A senior Russian aviation official said that Egypt was keeping tight control over data from the flight recorders and other instruments. Investigators from Russia and elsewhere in Europe, where the Airbus was manufactured, flew to Egypt to assist in the inquiry.
“The Egyptian commission is conducting the investigation, and is giving no records and transcripts, be it of the flight recorders or on-ground recorders or radar data, to anyone,” Alexander Neradko, the head of Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency, said on the Rossiya-24 news channel. The commission had yet to begin sifting through the data, he said.
The Metrojet officials said that the pilots gave no indication that the plane was in trouble and did not send any type of distress call.
The plane’s speed dropped to about 186 miles per hour and fell about 5,000 feet one minute before it crashed, Mr. Smirnov said, adding that the brief irregular flight path probably indicated that the pilots were struggling to control the Airbus 321-200.
He suggested that the sudden decompression of the plane as it broke apart likely incapacitated all on board immediately.
Aviation experts expressed disbelief that airline officials presented such strong assertions ruling out technical or human error even as the investigation was barely starting.
“I am surprised that an airline manager, at the point that we are at in this investigation, would make a statement like that,” said Robert T. Francis, a former vice chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board in the United States.
“Without the flight recorders having been read, and without more investigation of the fuselage, which is spread all over the place, I don’t think you can rule out anything.”
At the news conference, the airline, founded as Kogalymavia but flying under the name Metrojet, rejected criticism that the airplane was too old to fly. It also rejected the possibility that a tail strike in 2001 during a landing in Cairo, when the aircraft was operated by a different airline, might have left fatal structural flaws.
Andrei B. Averianov, Metrojet’s deputy director for engineering, ruled out both as possible factors during the hourlong news conference at the company’s headquarters in an office park in Moscow.
The 18-year-old Airbus A321-200 had flown just under 60,000 hours of its 120,000-hour life span, he said, adding that was not an “extraordinary” age compared to other European and Russian fleets. He also dismissed the tail strike as an issue.
“I am absolutely confident that this incident could not be the reason for what has happened because the plane was repaired by its manufacturer,” Mr. Averianov said, “Airbus has developed special technology for such repairs which guarantees the usage of such an airplane.”
He said the tail was checked every 24 months and any cracks or metal fatigue would have been discovered because such cracks develop slowly.
There have been at least two previous cases in which airplanes broke apart long after similar tail repairs were done.
A China Airlines Boeing 747 en route to Hong Kong from Taiwan in May 2002 broke into several pieces as it was climbing to 35,000 feet, killing all 225 people on board. The repairs made 22 years earlier on the tail failed, causing a sudden and explosive decompression, according to the analysis by the Taiwanese government.
A Japan Airlines 747 suffered a similar failure in 1985, seven years after a tail strike had been repaired. The crew struggled to control the plane for some 46 minutes after takeoff before it crashed, killing all but four of the 524 people on board.
Responding to accusations that the co-pilot had complained to his family about the technical state of the plane soon before the plane left, Mr. Averianov said there were no recent remarks in the logbook, and he said that the plane departed on schedule from Sharm el-Sheikh, indicating it had not been held up by technical issues.
The airplane officials said they had provided documents to the Investigate Committee, which is looking into any possible negligence of Russian law, to bolster its case.
But he repeated what senior transportation officials said a day earlier: The widely scattered debris field, almost 8 square miles, indicated that the plane had broken apart at a great height.
The Metrojet official was also dismissive about the claim by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, that it brought down the plane. “Judging by the video they put out, it seems that it is fake,” Mr. Smirnov said, referring to a blurry clip that that purported to show a missile strike on a plane that then erupts in a cloud of black smoke.
But other analysts have not discounted the possibility that a bomb was brought on board or stowed in the luggage. A bomb in the hold of a Pan Am Boeing 747 en route to New York from London exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988, bringing down the plane in a terrorist attack that was attributed to Libya.
Russia has fought a long-running Islamic insurgency in Chechnya, where two women armed with hand grenades destroyed two separate domestic flights in 2004.
More important, Russia recently deployed its armed forces in Syria to defend the rule of President Bashar al-Assad and to attack his opponents, including the Islamic State. That prompted calls for a global jihad against Russia.
The company said about 20 people had canceled their trips to Egypt immediately after the crash and were fully compensated, but that passengers were not abandoning trips in large numbers.
In St. Petersburg, where most of the passengers had lived, forensic medical experts began on Sunday the process of identifying bodies after a first cargo airplane from Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations carrying human remains arrived in the city overnight.
Footage released by the ministry showed the cargo plane returning to Pulkovo Airport, where the vacationers had been scheduled to arrive on Saturday, landing in a light rain. A motorcade brought the bodies to the morgue.
Some bodies would be shown to relatives at a city morgue, and by midday, 15 had been readied for identification, the ministry said.
Relatives waited in a hotel near the airport for word of when they would be called to the morgue. Larisa Y. Pulyanova and Anatoly L. Pulyanov waited to identify their only son, Roman A. Pulyanov, 29, who had been on vacation with his girlfriend.
Tears welling in her eyes, Ms. Pulyanova remembered her son as “young and tall and handsome.”
He had picked out Egypt, she said, because it was affordable at a price of 36,000 rubles, or $560, for two people for a week, and the couple did not want to spend more as they were saving money for their wedding.
“The saddest is that he was our only son,” she said.
Mr. Pulyanov said either terrorism or a mechanical problem appeared to be probable causes of the crash. He was too bereaved to be angry at anyone at the moment, he said.
Even if it were proven to be an act of terrorism related to Russia’s military action in Syria, he said, that would only justify the Kremlin’s decision to fight the Islamic State.
“But what difference does it make, I don’t have a son,” he said. “Now, that is how I feel. Maybe in a week, I will gather my thoughts and look at things differently.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/w...n-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
