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MOSCOW
— The mystery deepened Monday over the weekend crash of a Russian
charter plane on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt that killed all 224
aboard, with company executives ruling out technical or human error only
to be upbraided by aviation officials who called such assertions
premature.
As
representatives from at least five countries joined the investigation
of the Airbus jetliner crash, new questions also arose about the
aircraft’s repair history and the possibility that a terrorist act
felled it on Saturday.
The
Metrojet flight full of mostly Russian vacationers, bound for St.
Petersburg from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, plummeted after
reaching cruising altitude, scattering in chunks and bits across Sinai.
The lack of information has combined with unsubstantiated claims by the
Islamic State that its militants destroyed the aircraft to avenge
Russia’s immersion into the Syria war.
Senior
officials at Metrojet, the charter company that operated the aircraft,
sounded definitive in their insistence that the plane and crew were
faultless.
“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, told 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.
Hours after the Metrojet news conference, the Russian government contradicted the company’s assertions.
“Such
a statement is premature and is not based on any real facts,” Alexander
Neradko, the head of the federal Air Transportation Agency, said on the
Rossiya-24 news channel. “Much more work will have to be done on a
detailed study of the plane’s constructive elements; flight recorders
will have to be deciphered and analyzed.”
Mr.
Neradko also said Egypt was keeping tight control over data from the
flight recorders and other instruments. “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,” he said.
Mohamed
Rahma, a spokesman for Egypt’s civil aviation ministry, said on Monday
that Egyptian investigators still at the crash site had all but finished
the work of recovering the bodies. The remains of 196 passengers were
being flown to Russia, he said.
The
investigation team, which included French, German, Russian, Egyptian
and Irish investigators, would download and analyze data from the flight
recorders, he said, with no data analysis started yet.
Metrojet
officials also dismissed claims by the Islamic State that its
operatives felled the plane. They said a blurry video purporting to show
a missile strike on the plane appeared to be fake.
American
intelligence officials, as well, have expressed skepticism about the
assertion by the Islamic State. James R. Clapper Jr., the director of
national intelligence, and Nicholas J. Rasmussen, the director of the
National Counterterrorism Center, separately told a security conference
in Washington on Monday that American spy and security agencies so far
have no evidence that points to terrorism as the cause of the Russian
airliner crash.
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 and killing 270 people in a
terrorist attack that was attributed to Libya.
The
statements and lack of definitive facts only served to further muddle
what was known about the Metrojet crash, the latest in a string of
disasters to befall Egypt’s troubled tourism industry.
The
remains of most victims were flown overnight to St. Petersburg from
Cairo, their bodies taken early Monday from a Russian aircraft to the
main morgue in a long white truck. More were expected.
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, on
Monday spoke for the first time about the crash, 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.”
Metrojet
officials told the news conference that the pilots had given no
indication that the plane was in trouble and did not send any type of
distress call.
Mr.
Smirnov, Metrojet’s deputy director of aviation, asserted, again
without indicating his source, that the plane’s airspeed had slowed
significantly and that it suddenly dropped 5,000 feet in altitude one
minute before it crashed. Wild fluctuations in the plane’s altitude and
airspeed in its final 20 seconds could indicate that the pilots were
struggling to control the Airbus 321-200, he added.
He also 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 57,000 hours of its 120,000-hour life span, Mr.
Averianov 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 had been checked every 24 months and any cracks or metal
fatigue would have been discovered because such issues develop slowly.
Airbus
declined to comment, citing the investigation. A spokeswoman for
AerCap, the Netherlands-based company that owned the aircraft and had
leased it to Metrojet, did not return calls.
There
have been at least two previous cases in which airplanes either broke
apart or became unmanageable 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.
A
different type of crash, involving a spark in a fuel tank, broke apart a
TWA jumbo jet as it was ascending off Long Island in July 1996, killing
all 230 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
Investigative 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 eight square miles, indicated
that the plane had broken apart at a great height.
Russia
has long been concerned with Islamic militant attacks against it. The
Russians have 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.
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