© Maxim Shemetov / ReutersPeople arrange candles to make a cross to commemorate 224 victims of a Russian airliner which crashed in Egypt, on the stairs of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, Russia, November 1, 2015.
"It would be wrong to articulate any preliminary guesses or voice statements that are not based on anything," said Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for the Russian president, on Monday. "Let the investigators produce at least some results first."
The 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.
The airline doesn't believe human error could have been the cause of the disaster either, citing the experience of its captain and other crewmembers.
"We are certain that neither technical malfunction nor pilot error" can be blamed for the disaster, Smirnov said.
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 company gave assurances that the crashed Airbus had passed all necessary tests, including a check for metal fatigue in 2014, an inspection that must be done every six years.
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.
The situation is expected to become clearer after the data is recovered from the plane's flight recorders. They were recovered from the crash site and are "in good condition" Vladimir Puchkov, the head of Russia's Emergencies Ministry told the media on Monday, after inspecting the devices. Egypt is to decide where the analysis of the records will be conducted, since according to international rules it is responsible for investigating the crash.
A militant group associated with Islamic State claimed to have shot down the Russian plane. But this claim was deemed unreliable, since the shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles they may have in their possession have too short a range to take down a plane flying at a high altitude.
"Now, different media report... that a Russian passenger airliner on a flight from Sharm El-Sheikh to St. Petersburg has been allegedly shot down by an anti-aircraft missile fired by terrorists. This information cannot be regarded as reliable," said Russian Transport Minister Maksim Sokolov.
Egyptian Prime Minister Sharif Ismail has also expressed doubt about the claim.
"Experts have affirmed that technically planes at this altitude cannot be shot down, and the black box will be the one that will reveal the reasons for the crash," Mr Ismail was quoted by state news agency MENA as saying.
Reader Comments
We don't do that in the West. On the contrary, we have to create a story before there are any facts, and once the facts are out, we simply ignore them or try to present them as meaning the opposite of what they mean.
"the black box will be the one that will reveal the reasons for the crash"
Unless we get our hands on it first, haha!