KIN ON HAND TO ID RUSSIAN CRASH VICTIMS
By Mike Eckel
phillyBurbs.com, PA
May 4 2006
SOCHI, Russia – Searchers combed the waters off a Russian resort city
Thursday, looking for bodies and a flight recorder from an Armenian
passenger jet that slammed into the Black Sea in bad weather and
disintegrated, killing all 113 people on board.
Anguished relatives and friends gathered at a central hotel and a
city morgue, where many stared ashen-faced at grotesquely disfigured
faces and bodies appearing in coroners’ photographs.
The photos were posted on a nearly 6-foot-high wooden board in the
courtyard. Forensic authorities emerged from the building periodically
asking if anyone had recognized a person in the photographs.
Fifty-three bodies had been recovered so far, of which just 28 were
identified, Transport Minister Igor Levitin said. The plane was
traveling to Sochi from the Armenian capital, Yerevan, and most of
the passengers were Armenian.
President Vladimir Putin told chief prosecutor Vladimir Ustinov in
televised comments to work fast to determine the cause of the crash,
but acknowledged it would be difficult without flight recorders.
Levitin told reporters that searchers had located a large part of
the plane’s fuselage that was emitting a radio signal believed to
be from a flight recorder, and Russian news agencies later quoted
an emergency official as saying signals from a second “black box”
were detected nearby.
But Levitin said the debris lay in some 2,230 feet of water, and that
Russian authorities did not have the equipment to raise the wreckage.
“We will turn to other countries that have the experience in raising
objects from the depths,” he said.
The Airbus A-320 plunged into the sea in the pre-dawn hours Wednesday
in heavy rain and poor visibility as it approached the airport in
Adler, about 12 miles south of Sochi, a city wedged between the sea
and soaring, snowcapped mountains. Searchers found wreckage spread
over a wide area about 3 1/2 miles offshore.
Federal prosecutors dismissed the possibility of terrorism, and
other officials pointed to the rough weather or pilot error as the
likely cause.
The head of the Georgian air control agency, which covered 90 percent
of the Armavia jet’s final flight, said the crew had begun to return
to Yerevan because of weather conditions around Sochi. But when it
was over the western Georgian city of Kutaisi, Russian air controllers
announced that the weather at the Adler airport had improved.
“And since they had enough fuel, the pilot decided to fly back
to Adler,” Georgian agency chief Georgy Karbelashvili told The
Associated Press.
The Interfax news agency, citing an unidentified official in
the Russian commission investigating the disaster, said there was
information indicating the crew was informed just three to four miles
from the runway, when the plane was at an altitude of about 1,000 feet,
that landing was “not recommended.” The official said the plane was
turning back when it hit the water.
The president of the Armenian Aviation Association, former pilot Dmitry
Adbashian, said in Yerevan that Sochi’s airport is difficult because
of limited approaches and fickle weather, and that rules established
in the Soviet era prohibited inexperienced pilots from landing there.
He told the AP it is impossible for a plane that is less than 2
1/2 miles out and lower than 650 feet to pull back and start a new
approach.