This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/02/world/europe/russia-plane-crash-sinai-peninsula-egypt.html

The article has changed 8 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 4 Version 5
Russia Mourns as Officials Work to Determine Cause of Jet Crash Russia Mourns as Officials Seek Cause of Jet Crash in Egypt
(about 7 hours later)
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — Russia held a day of mourning Sunday for the 224 people, mostly young families on vacation, who died in a passenger jet crash in Egypt over the weekend, while a senior Russian aviation official said the wide scattering of the debris showed the plane had broken up in the air. ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — As Russia mourned the 224 victims of a charter flight that crashed over the weekend on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, investigators on Sunday began the difficult process of trying to determine whether the plane, which they said had broken up in midair, was brought down by an act of terrorism or a tragic accident.
Dispersed over a black-pebble desert in the Sinai Peninsula were suitcases, rainbow-hued beach clothing, children’s dolls and the bodies of Russians, the latter wrapped in white shrouds, footage showed. After surveying the wreckage scattered across eight square miles of the barren, black pebbles of the Sinai desert plateau, Viktor Sorochenko, the director of the Interstate Aviation Commission, told journalists that the wide dispersion meant that the plane had disintegrated before the pieces fell to earth.
Viktor Sorochenko, the director of the Interstate Aviation Committee, said the pattern of the debris proved that the plane disentegrated in the air. But that alone did not indicate any specific cause for the crash, he said, describing the debris field as a giant ellipse. “It is too soon to talk about conclusions,” he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. “The collapse occurred in midair, and the wreckage is scattered over a vast area.”
Government officials and airline executives are considering either mechanical failures or terrorism as possible causes, as preconditions for both scenarios seemed to be present. The circumstances of the crash kept alive the dual possibilities that mechanical failure or terrorism might have caused the catastrophe. Either appeared plausible to aviation experts.
Russian charter airlines have a poor safety record while an Islamic insurgency against the Egyptian government has simmered for years in the northern Sinai Peninsula area where the plane crashed. One former French accident investigator, Alain Bouillard, said he could think of no plausible scenario in which a mechanical problem could have led to a midair breakup at cruising altitude of a modern aircraft like the Airbus A321-200 that crashed in the Sinai.
Flight recorders from the Airbus A321-200 airplane that had been recovered a day earlier were in good enough condition to decipher, Maksim Sokolov, Russia’s minister of transportation, said Sunday. “A rupture in flight after a technical fault seems to me highly improbable,” he added.
But no new details of the possible cause of the crash came to light. Government officials and airline executives were considering both mechanical failure and terrorism as possible causes. But Mark Rosenker, a former chairman of the United States National Transportation Safety Board, said he thought the crash was more likely to be an accident than terrorism and noted that the plane had been damaged in 2001 when its tail struck the runway upon landing in Cairo. (At the time, the plane was operated by Middle East Airlines, a Lebanese carrier.) But he said that he could not rule out terrorism as a possibility.
Mr. Sokolov had issued a statement on Saturday rejecting reports that the plane had been the target of a terrorist attack as “fabrications.” United States government officials said on Sunday they remained skeptical that terrorism was involved, and instead focused on indications of some sort of mechanical failure. Information extracted from the black boxes, which have already been recovered, would likely yield further clues as to what happened.
Still, Emirates airline on Sunday joined Air France and Lufthansa in announcing that flights would be rerouted around the Sinai Peninsula as a precaution until the risk of a surface-to-air missile attack could be ruled out. Lufthansa said this would involve rerouting flights to six destinations. Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, said on Sunday that the investigation could take months and that his government had no plans to issue frequent updates about its progress.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia established a state commission to investigate the crash. The Russian government also sent planes from its emergency services to take to the scene a team of investigators, who arrived on Sunday. “We do not want to jump ahead of events and talk, because even that takes away from our credibility,” he said during a speech to Egyptian military officials.
By midmorning, search crews had transferred 163 bodies from the site to Egyptian hospitals and morgues. In St. Petersburg on Sunday, an endless stream of the bereaved, many of whom knew none of the victims, filed passed an impromptu shrine outside Pulkovo Airport, tearfully leaving flowers and stuffed animals in tribute to the dead. Thousands more attended a candlelight vigil in the windy, early darkness of fall outside the city’s famed Winter Palace.
The crash threw a spotlight on the extraordinary popularity among Russians of wintertime vacations to Egypt, which is widely considered here the cheapest destination with reliable winter sun. Flags were lowered to half-staff throughout the country, and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church reflected the somber mood in a sermon expressing compassion for the victims of Russia’s worst air disaster ever.
The sharp drop in the value of the ruble and tensions with the West over the past year have sharply diminished the number of Russians traveling. But despite the downturn, Russian tourism to Egypt has declined only 13 percent this year, compared with a 25-percent drop in travel to Turkey and a 43-percent decline in travel to Spain. “Two hundred twenty-four people, mainly young and healthy, including children, happy on the way back from a holiday — they were probably chatting merrily, recalling their vacation,” he said during his Sunday sermon in Moscow, according to the Interfax news agency. “Everything was cut tragically short.”
A basic package tour, including a flight, hotel and meals, can be had for as little as $500 or $600 a week — but often comes with a trade-off: transportation on aging airplanes operated by little-known charter airlines. Russian charter airlines have a dismal safety record, while a violent Islamic insurgency has long plagued the northern Sinai Peninsula where the plane crashed. Its fighters possess at least short-range, shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, although not the type that can blast an airplane near a cruising altitude of 31,000 feet.
The wife of the co-pilot of the Airbus that crashed told Russia’s NTV channel that her husband had complained about the mechanical condition of the plane, operated by Kogalymavia, a private company flying planes under the name Metrojet. The woman, Natalya Trukhacheva, told the station that her husband had said “before the flight that the technical condition of the airplane left much to be desired.” Russia’s military entered the Syrian civil war on the side of the government a month ago, with some 50 aircraft bombing targets of virtually all the groups opposed to President Bashar al-Assad, including Islamic State. That prompted Islamic extremists to call for jihad against Russia, and its law enforcement agencies have claimed to break up several terrorist plots.
On Sunday, the newspaper Izvestia reported that the airline had fallen into financial difficulties recently and owed money to a pension fund. A spokeswoman for the airline said on Saturday that its planes had undergone regular maintenance and were flown by experienced pilots. The flight recorders from the 18-year-old Airbus A321-200 were in good enough condition to decipher, Maxim Sokolov, Russia’s minister of transportation, said Sunday before leaving Egypt to return home, but that work had not yet begun. He had earlier rejected terrorism as a possible explanation for the crash as “fabrications.”
RBK, a Russian newspaper, noted that the passenger manifest included many people with the same last names, indicating that the plane was packed with families on vacation. The Islamic State’s Sinai branch, which had released a statement claiming responsibility for bringing down the Russian airplane within hours of the crash, did not provide any further evidence to support its claim on Sunday.
Two of the passengers were Yuri and Olga Sheina, a husband and wife from St. Petersburg who had meticulously documented their holiday on VKontakte, a Russian version of Facebook. The group has often released photographs or videos after large-scale attacks, showing the assaults or profiles of the attackers to prove its claims. In the past, the Islamic State group has also issued false statements of responsibility in Egypt.
The trip was intended to celebrate a special day, Oct. 27, the fourth anniversary of their wedding and also the tenth anniversary of the day they first met, according to their posts. Analysts have said that it was unlikely that militants could have shot down the plane, though they have left open the possibility of a bomb or some other sabotage.
“Egypt, sun, sea,” Mrs. Sheina wrote before leaving St. Petersburg, a city that grows increasingly dark and gloomy at this time of year. “We are flying on vacation!” Air Arabia, Emirates, and FlyDubai airlines on Sunday joined Air France-KLM and Lufthansa in announcing that flights would be rerouted around the Sinai Peninsula as a precaution, until the risk of a surface-to-air missile attack could be ruled out.
On the anniversary date, celebrating by the sea, she wrote, “this is the day we met and fell in love with each other forever,” and posted coquettish snapshots of herself posing before a spray of bougainvillea flowers, smoking a water pipe and sunning by a pool. Paul Hayes, director of Ascend Worldwide, a British aviation consultancy, said a midair breakup did not rule out mechanical faults or pilot error as a cause, while also leaving open the possibility of terrorism.
The last post showed her husband carrying onto the Metrojet Airbus their 3-year-old daughter, who wore a pink T-shirt that said “Sweetie” on it. “Hello Peter, Goodbye Egypt” the girl’s mother wrote. “Airplanes have broken up as a result of sabotage or a bomb on board, and also during efforts to recover that overstressed the airframe,” he said, referring to a pilot’s efforts to recover from a stall or spin at a high speed. “The breakup could have occurred during an out-of-control descent.”
But the plane never made it out of Egypt, crashing about 25 minutes after takeoff in the Sinai Desert. The first remains were expected to arrive later Sunday in St. Petersburg, where the authorities had collected DNA samples from 140 relatives by Sunday morning to aid in identifying the victims. Experts and other commentators in Russia leaned heavily toward mechanical explanations, not a stretch given the dismal safety record of its airline industry.
On Sunday, St. Petersburg mourned. Through the day, flowers and stuffed animals piled up at a makeshift memorial at Pulkovo airport, forming a somber scene as Russians commemorated their dead, lowered their heads, and cried. The wife of the co-pilot of the Airbus told Russia’s NTV channel that her husband had complained about the mechanical condition of the plane, operated by Kogalymavia, a private company flying planes under the name Metrojet. The woman, Natalya Trukhacheva, told the station that her husband had said before the flight that the “technical condition of the airplane left much to be desired.”
“This is a personal tragedy of St. Petersburg,” said Dmitry Komarov, who came to the shrine with his wife, Anastasia Komarova. She was weeping. Yulia Latynina, a columnist in Novaya Gazeta, wrote that the basic conclusion to be drawn from the crash was that the Russian aviation industry was in disarray and that the government was to blame for not clearing it up. “Some simple advice: do not ever fly on Russian charter flights,” she wrote.
While travelers passing the airport memorial said they now feared to fly on charter airlines, others saw terrorism as the likely culprit. Alexander Fridland, an expert from the Russian Institute for Civilian Aviation Research told RBC newspaper that the reason could be troubles with the electric system, a fire on board or possibly an explosion in the hold. He discounted engine trouble. “If something is wrong, the crew won’t take off,” he said. “They are not suicidal, after all.”
Sergei Kubar, who traveled to the Sharm el-Sheikh resort just a month ago with a different airline, blamed terrorists. “When Putin started to bomb Syria, I said we could expect something like this.” Other experts noted that an engine fire should not prove fatal, that the plane could fly on one engine or even none, and would have plenty of time to radio to ground control that it was in trouble.
One man, who offered only his first name, Ivan, came to commemorate a friend, a man he had met years earlier in a cafe and had stayed in touch with. The sudden dive and radio silence prompted some to conclude that Islamic State was responsible, taking revenge for the military campaign that President Vladimir V. Putin began in Syria a month ago.
“He was just a good person, a friend,” Ivan said, as he blinked his eyes filling with tears. Among the mourners at the St. Petersburg airport shrine, Sergei Kubar blamed terrorists. “When Putin started to bomb Syria, I said we could expect something like this,” he said.
The stack of flowers, in bouquets of even numbers, the tradition for honoring the dead here, grew on a bench along with multiple rows of soccer balls, teddy bears and other toys laid out on the ground in a farewell to the children who died. Discussion forums on television devoted some time to discussing the possibility of terrorism, but the news programs on state-run television and the country’s more high profile commentators largely avoided the question. News reports only mentioned the Islamic State claim in passing, dismissing it quickly.
Other issues prompted much more of a discussion. First, the dual reaction in Ukraine, home to three of the victims. The crash prompted an outpouring of sympathy, with flowers and condolence notes placed outside the Russian Embassy in Kiev.
Russian-backed separatists are believed to have used a surface-to-air missile to bring down a Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying over Ukraine in July 2014, killing all 298 people on board. Russia has strenuously denied any connection to the tragedy.
In Egypt, search crews had transferred 163 bodies from the site to Cairo hospitals and morgues by Sunday. Most of them were due to be flown back to St. Petersburg overnight, the Egyptian government said in a statement.
A passenger manifest released by the Russian government indicated that many victims were young families, including at least 17 children, or young singles.
In St. Petersburg, Aleksander Danilov, 30, carried a picture of his sister, Natalya, 28, onto Palace Square for the candlelit vigil attended by a huge cross-section of the city.
She and two friends had been ecstatic to find a cheap deal for what was Ms. Danilova’s second trip to Egypt, he said.
Mr. Danilov and his mother said that they had tried to call Metrojet, the charter company, to find out more details of what happened but could not get through. No one from the airline had called them.
“They buy old, cheap scrap metal,” he said, referring to the planes. “We should be building our own planes.”
Nearby, Aleksander Telyupa, 34, said he had lost a good friend, Lyubov Mozgina, who had been flying with her daughter and mother. Ms. Mozgina went to Egypt every year because she felt a strong connection with an ancient Egyptian goddess, he said.
“God had sent her warnings not to travel there — last year she broke her arm in Egypt and suffered other misfortunes,” he said. “She said it felt like her home.”