MOSCOW,(Sputnik) – Flight FZ981 carrying 62 passengers and crew from Dubai crashed a few hundred feet off the Rostov-on-Don airport runway early Saturday, killing everyone on board. Preliminary data indicted poor visibility in bad weather conditions as the cause of the tragedy as investigators planned to obtain clues from recovered data recorders within a month.
According to The Wall Street Journal, citing the airline’s spokesman, the flight number FZ981 will be replaced by FZ935 of respect for the victims.
Experts from the United States, the United Arab Emirates, France, and countries whose citizens were killed in the plane crash in Russia, have been invited to participate in the decoding of the black boxes. The Russian Investigative Committee is considering several scenarios that may have caused the crash, including human error, technical failure and difficult weather conditions.