The Russian passenger jet that crashed in Sinai, Egypt, must have been damaged by a force in flight and couldn’t have just broken apart, the airline of the ill-fated Airbus A321 said.
he crew of Kolavia Flight 7K9268 was apparently disabled before the aircraft started its rapid descent and crashed in the Sinai Peninsula on Saturday, Viktor Yung, deputy director of the airline told the media on Monday.
“As the catastrophic incident started to develop, the crew members were rendered completely incapable. This explains why they didn’t attempt to contact air traffic and report the incident happening on board,” he said.
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9:57 AM - 2 Nov 2015
The company believes that serious structural damage by an external force may have caused the crash.
“The only possible explanation is a mechanical force acting on the aircraft,” Aleksand Smirnov, who supervises the company’s fleet, said. “There is no combination of system failures that could have broken the plane apart in the air.”
The airline Kogalymavia, which uses the brand name Metrojet, owns the Airbus A321 that crashed in Egypt just 20 minutes after it took off Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport. All 224 people on board died in the disaster, making it the deadliest incident of this kind in Russian aviation history.
Investigators said they were looking into all possible causes of the crash, including human error, technical failure and foul play.
By RT