Egypt: updated 10 minutes ago

Russian plane crash: Egyptian rescuers hear voices in wreckage
Search officials in Sinai report ‘pained voices’ coming from section of aircraft that was carrying 224 people from Sharm el-Sheik

Saturday 31 October 2015

A Russian plane carrying more than 200 passengers from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh has crashed in central Sinai with most of those on board feared dead.

The jet, operated by the Russian company Kogalymavia and branded as Metrojet, was “completely destroyed with all on board likely to have died”, a security officer from the search and rescue team said.

But officers at the scene said the voices of trapped passengers could be heard from a section of the crashed plane. Destined for St Petersburg, it was carrying 224 people, including 17 children and seven crew members.

“The plane split into two, a small part on the tail end that burned and a larger part that crashed into a rock. We have extracted at least 100 bodies and the rest are still inside,” an anonymous officer told Reuters.

“There is another section of the plane with passengers inside that the rescue team is still trying to enter and we hope to find survivors, especially after hearing pained voices of people inside.”

Egypt’s health ministry had dispatched 45 ambulances to the scene to “evacuate the dead and wounded” which could indicate the possibility of survivors, though this remains unconfirmed. At least five of the children on board are feared dead.

The crash site was found on Saturday morning in southern Arish, a mountainous area of central Sinai, but poor weather conditions were making it difficult for some rescue crews to reach the scene, the security officer said.

Northern Sinai is home to groups of Islamist militants, many affiliated to Islamic State, but there were no indications the plane was shot down, Egyptian security sources told Reuters.

A statement from the Egyptian prime minister’s office said Sherif Ismail formed a cabinet-level crisis committee to deal with the crash, which was believed to have been caused by a mechanical failure. The prime minister has since departed for the crash site with several cabinet ministers on a private jet, the tourism ministry said.

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24)
October 31, 2015
Looping playback of #7K9268. Last data recorded at 04:13:22 UTC http://t.co/RlcJTpDHwI pic.twitter.com/fb2aDxPUBw/

The plane, which had a tail number of EI-ETJ, lost contact 23 minutes after takeoff while flying at more than 30,000 ft above sea level, according to the plane tracker website Flight Radar. It had begun to make a steep descent at a rate of 6,000 feet per minute shortly before communications were lost.

Russia’s aviation authority, Rosaviatsiya, said flight 7K9268 had left at 03:51 GMT and was due into St Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport at 12:10, it told TASS news agency. The plane had failed to make scheduled contact with Cyprus air traffic control and disappeared from the radar.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his deepest condolences to the families of victims of the crash of a Russian airliner in Egypt, Russian news agencies reported. Putin also ordered government ministries to offer immediate assistance to relatives of those killed.

The Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh is a popular destination for Russian tourists and it is believed the majority of those on board were Russians. Distraught friends and family began arriving at St Petersburg airport on Saturday.

“I am meeting my parents,” said 25-year-old Ella Smirnova. “I spoke to them last on the phone when they were already on the plane, and then I heard the news. I will keep hoping until the end that they are alive, but perhaps I will never see them again.”

Egypt says no survivors from Russian plane crash | World news | The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/31/russian-plane-crashes-in-sinai-egyptian-pm-says/

possible technical Failure,which could point to sloppy Maintenance!
Sad that always the wrong ones have to pay!

I am suspicious of this. Considering, polical, profit & power & land & a evil strategies.
* All I am saying *

Who are/ were these 200 + people?

Are there voices of survivors or not. ?

Considering the location, I'd be looking for a jihadi hijacking. Altitude is too high for a manpad, and I doubt the local AK-47 toters have tracked anti-aircraft missile systems.

Russians, now by bombing ISIS makes them a target for middle east groups, and not just those from the 'stan' countries.

Condolences the victims and families.

Reports now have ISIS claiming to have brought down the airliner. They don't specify how of course.

Debris field reported to be about 3 miles in size would point to the aircraft breaking up in flight.

Reports of sudden loss of radio contact, and a change in altitude equal to a 6,000 foot per minute descent sounds like a catastrophic failure and loss of control.

Even at a rate of 6,000 ft per minute, anyone still conscious in the cabin or cockpit had to wait a full five minutes for impact.

I hate to sound 'dark' but I can't imagine the panic and helplessness of knowing your fate is sealed, and you have no alternative but to simply sit there and wait for your world to be smashed into total blackness in a millisecond resulting in your death. Other people screaming, kids crying, it must be horrific.

I can only hope the cabin was breached, and everyone passed out from loss of cabin pressure. A little more humane at least.

*shrug*

Maybe the debris of the ruskie jet,
can be stored with the debris of the Korean jetliner the ruskies shot down.

The news spoke of the plane just getting an "inspection".

Maybe the inspection was the problem. The Russkies have been killing folks lately.

Like Something barometrically actuated?

And carefully inserted.

Here's what I am reading, by American, UK & Russian articles.
The ONLY thing ALL of them are agreeing on is how many children (under 17) are dead. Okay...Universal innocents.

But no agreement on how many adults are actually dead. Sputnik is only claiming 100. Others almost 300.

And WHO are these deceased? Not one article I have seen is questioning that.

And a few are questioning the legal citizenship of three passengers.

Someone translate Egyptian for me, so I can be further annoyed & suspicious.

It is 2015 it shouldn't take this long for facts or a story to stick too.

before its news says Russian elites... but that means nothing, considering the source...

"supposedly" a video of the plane blowing up

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW9lUPLQag8

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt -- The Russian passenger plane that crashed in Egypt, killing everyone onboard, broke up at high altitude, Russia's top aviation official said Sunday.

apparently they found both of the "Black Boxes"!

There are conflicting reports about this crash. The pilots "called in" which usually doesn't happen if the plane is breaking up. They are too busy. The first rule of piloting, is "fly the plane".

The large debris field means that the parts are scattered over a wide area. That also means the part(s) that failed will take a while, if ever, to find. Blast damaged parts are easy to spot due to the burning and twisting of metal not caused by falling to the ground. In the photos, the tail appears to have separated from the rest of the plane.

The Russians are conducting the investigation which means the actual cause of the crash may not be reported and whatever politically useful explanation will be forthcoming.

Some news sources have reported a possible "engine failure". An engine failure would only cause the plane to be diverted to another nearby landing spot. The plane will fly just fine without one engine.

A small bomb located in the tail section could cause complete loss of control by damaging the control systems or structurally damaging the horizontal stabilizer (the plane can't fly without it).

Metrojet Crash: What Could Cause a Plane to Break Up in Midair?

- NBC News

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/russian-plane-crashes-in-the-sinai/metrojet-crash-what-could-cause-plane-break-midair-n455591/ * Video & pics on link *

NBC - November 2, 2015

External Influence Only Reasonable Explanation: Russian Airline Says 0:49
As search teams combed a six square-mile area of Egyptian desert Monday for wreckage from the Metrojet plane crash, investigators were focusing on what might have caused the Airbus A321 to break up in midair.

Flight 7K9268 was carrying 224 passengers, mostly Russian vacationers, from the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg early Saturday when it crashed over Sinai.

Alexander Neradko, head of Russia's federal aviation agency, told reporters Sunday that the large area over which plane debris fragments were found indicates the plane disintegrated in flight.


That view was echoed by aviation experts who told NBC News that images from the scene and the apparent lack of a distress call pointed to a catastrophic midair breakup — but there was already disagreement on whether mechanical failure, an explosion or something else was to blame.

"I think [they] are going to be able to tell I think what direction this investigation needs to go in pretty quickly, if they've got good information form the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder," said ex-NTSB investigator and NBC News air crash expert Greg Feith.

Mechanical or structural failure
A focus for investigators will be whether the 18-year-old plane was structurally compromised by a repair job after a 2001 accident in which its tail struck the runway during a landing at Cairo airport. The plane suffered "serious damage," according to aviation publication Flight Global.

Post-accident repairs in the same section of the plane have caused at least two other midair breakups, including the world's second-deadliest plane crash.

In 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123 suffered an explosive decompression caused by a faulty repair carried out seven years earlier after a tail strike; the Boeing 747's rear pressure bulkhead failed 12 minutes into the flight and it crashed into a mountainside, killing 505 of the 509 passengers on board. The rear pressure bulkhead is a sealed wall, between the back of the passenger cabin and the tail of the plane, which maintains the cabin pressure during flight.


The extreme tail section of the wrecked plane, including the area behind the rear pressure bulkhead. Maxim Grigoriev / Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations via AP
"Tail strike damage tends to be around the region of the rear pressure bulkhead," Tony Cable, a former senior investigator at the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch, told The Guardian. "The cabin might be pressurized at around six pounds per square inch above outside pressure. But the fuselage directly behind that is at outside pressure. So any weakness or fatigue would be bad news."

David Gleave, a U.K.-based aviation safety analyst, said: "The pictures from the Metrojet scene show the very rear of the aircraft, with what's left of the tail fin, a considerable distance from the rest of the wreckage. That would suggest a clean break around the rear pressure bulkhead. I think investigators will be focusing very carefully on the repairs carried out."

Alexander Smirnov, the deputy general director of Metrojet, told reporters in Russia Monday that a technical fault could not be to blame, and that the cause "could only have been a mechanical impact on the plane" in the air — but declined to elaborate. He insisted that the plane, registered in Ireland to a Dutch-owned leasing company, was fit to fly.

Gleave said tail strikes occur "about 10 times a year" and resulting damage could vary from nothing more than scraped paint to a structural problem. "There are probably about 250 aircraft flying around with these kinds of post-tail strike repairs," he said. "As long as they have been carried out in line with manufacturers' instructions there should be no problem."

However, the co-pilot's wife told Russia's state-controlled NTV that her husband complained about the plane before taking off on the doomed flight.

"He complained before the flight that the technical condition of the aircraft left much to be desired," Natalya Trukhacheva said.

Explosion
"One of the things that you can't rule out at this time is whether or not there was some sort of explosive device on board the aircraft," said Feith.

Standards of security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport — a key driver of Egypt's tourism economy — are relatively high and monitored by the dozens of European airlines that fly there. However, one theory is that explosives may have been smuggled aboard and detonated midair in a scenario similar to the inflight breakup of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988.

"It could have been a bomb," Paul Rogers, a global security consultant and professor at the University of Bradford in England, told the BBC. "The fact is that Russia recently intervened in Syria and … this could be a nasty blowback as far as [President Vladimir] Putin is concerned. The reality is that neither Egypt nor Russia will want to admit it involved terrorism and it may never come out fully."

Feith said analysis of the flight data recorder should quickly determine whether an explosion or a mechanical failure precipitated the break-up.

"If it was an explosive device the flight data recorder won't exactly give you a lot of detail other than a lot of the parameters will go basically to their extremes," he said. "You'll see a lot of things that won't look logical. The cockpit voice recorder if it has good data is probably the best source because it will record the instantaneous explosion or some sort of other telltale noise that investigators may be able to, through sound spectrum analysis, determine was an explosion on the aircraft of some source."

Not every airplane explosion is deliberate, however. TWA Flight 800 broke apart in midair in 1996 after a fuel tank explosion that weakened the plane's structure.

"They're going to be looking at the flight controls, they'll be looking at the fuel system and then they'll also be looking at maintenance issues that may have induced some sort of technical failure," Feith said.

Missile
A local ISIS affiliate claimed it brought down the aircraft, which crashed in an area where Egyptian military and security forces have battled militants for years.

It is a popular theory among mourners Russia. "Everyone thinks it was ... these Islamic fundamentalists," Mikhail Kudryavtsev told The Associated Press at a cathedral in St. Petersburg where hundreds of worshippers lit candles, laid flowers and prayed for the victims.

However, Russian officials and experts have dismissed claim as not credible because militants lacked the weapons to do it.

"I think the claims by ISIS are a propaganda grab," said former captain and NBC News aviation expert John Cox. "They don't have the weaponry necessary to reach an airplane at 31,000 feet. They can only go to ten, maybe, 12,000 feet and this airplane was very much higher than that. I don't put any real credibility in the claim by ISIS at this point."

That was echoed by Feith, who said investigators would be focusing on "some sort of onboard device rather than a shoot down" if an explosion were found to be the cause.

"From just a general understanding missiles won't typically from the ground launch to 30,000 feet, there is no evidence to suggest that," he said.

© 2015 NBCNEWS.COM

Just before a Russian passenger airliner crashed in Egypt's Sinai on Saturday, a US infrared satellite reportedly detected a heat flash in the same vicinity, indicating that an explosion may have happened on board.

The US intelligence community believes that a fuel tank or bomb may have been the source of the heat signature, NBC News reported. The same satellite ruled out a missile attack, as it didn't detect a heat trail that a rocket engine would have produced, the channel's source said.

The heat flash may not be related to the crash since the Sinai Peninsula is a volatile place with regular military activity, a Pentagon official told ABC News.

As the investigation into the deadliest air incident in Russia's history, which has claimed 224 lives, mostly Russian, is under way, officials say it's too early to pronounce the cause of the crash - and that no version has been ruled out.

Preliminary data indicates that the Airbus 321 en route from Sharm-el-Sheikh to St Petersburg sustained heavy damage as it was traveling at an altitude of over 10,000 meters and the crew had no control over its descent. Rescue workers have found 12 large pieces of the plane's hull at the crash site, indicating how badly it was damaged in the incident, Russian officials reported.

"There is much work to be done to study the debris of the aircraft and the data of the flight recorders," the head of the Russian aviation authority, Aleksand Neradko, told Rossiya 24 news channel. "The debris is indeed spread over a large area indicating that the plane fell apart at a high altitude. But speculating on the cause is premature."

READ MORE: Only external force could have broken apart crashed Russian airliner - owner

The plane's owner, Kogalymavia, which uses the brand name Metrojet, insists that neither human error nor technical malfunction could have caused the crash, and cited an "external force" as the cause of the crash. The Russian authorities have said it is too early to confirm the claim.

LISTEN MORE:

Earlier a militant group affiliated with the terrorist organization Islamic State claimed to have taken down the Russian plane with a missile. The claim was deemed unlikely to be true by Egyptian and Russian officials, since the militants don't have surface-to-air missiles with a range long enough to attack high-flying passenger planes.

http://www.rt.com/news/320588-heat-flash-plane-sinai/

Moe could not use your link..for some reason. It was weird. But did get it off of Conan's.

Okay..so the 'heat flash' radar claim is just coming out now? How many days after... The first report of the down plane in Egypt ? I think the story broke & I made the thread about 30-48 hrs later.

thats why he reposted it without saying anything... (the "s" in the http was still there)

they are investigating, you know they don't revel anything till they know more... they know it's was a bomb inside the plane, that video i posted shows it pretty well... it wasn't a missile...