Russian plane ‘broke up in air’, officials say too early for conclusions

A Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula broke up in mid-air, an official of a Moscow-based aviation agency said on Sunday. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged patience to determine the cause of Saturday’s crash, which killed all 224 people on board, after the Islamic State jihadist group (IS) claimed it brought down the A-321 Airbus.  Officers involved in the search efforts said rescue crews had recovered 168 bodies so far. Egyptian analysts have also begun examining the contents of the two “black box” recorders recovered from the airliner although the process, according to a civil aviation source, could take days.

In such cases, leave it to specialists to determine the cause of the plane crash because it is a subject of an extensive and complicated technical study.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi

Both Cairo and Moscow have downplayed the claim from Egypt’s IS branch that it brought down the aircraft. The IS affiliate waging an insurgency in the Sinai claimed it took out the aircraft in revenge for Russian air strikes against the jihadist group in Syria. Prime Minister Sharif Ismail said experts dismissed this idea confirming the militants could not down a plane flying at 30,000 feet (9,000 metres), the aircraft’s flight level. Experts said a surface-to-air missile could have struck the aircraft if it had been descending, and that a bomb on board could not yet be ruled out, but technical or human error was more likely.

This requires trained people and equipment that IS does not have, to my knowledge.

Jean-Paul Troadec, former director of France’s BEA aviation investigation agency.

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