MOSCOW, May 3 (RIA Novosti) - Airbus experts will work with investigators from Russia and Armenia to establish why one of the French concern's planes crashed over the Black Sea early Wednesday with the loss of everyone on board.
A total of 113 passengers and crew died when an Armavia Airlines A-320 flying from the capital of Armenia, Yerevan, came down about six kilometers off Russia's Black Sea coast while heading for an airport in Adler, which services the popular resort of Sochi.
The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said bad weather - heavy rain had been reported in the area - was the most probable cause of the tragedy and a local Interior Ministry official said terrorism was an unlikely version.
"The information provided by the Azov-Black Sea department of transport police includes no indication of a terrorist attack," Igor Zhukov said. "We are considering several versions: a mistake made by the pilot, a technical malfunction or a mistake by air traffic controllers."
Toulouse-based Airbus said its experts would work in compliance with international conventions governing the investigation of air crashes and would provide technical assistance to the Russian authorities leading efforts to identify the cause of the tragedy.
However, a senior Russian aviation expert said efforts in this area would be complicated as the plane's flight recorders were unlikely to be found.
Rudolf Teimurazov, the chairman of the Interstate Aviation Committee, said attempts to locate the black boxes of a Russian Tu-154 airliner that was accidentally shot down by a Ukrainian missile over the Black Sea in 2001 had been unsuccessful.
"I am skeptical about the possibility of finding something on the Black Sea seabed at a distance of over one kilometer from the coast," he said, adding that there was a huge layer of sulfuric hydride sludge near the seafloor.
"After the Tu-154 was shot down, we found no more than 3% of the wreckage and could not even dream of [finding] the flight recorders," he said.
A Russian air traffic expert said the crash was Russia's first incident involving an A-320, adding that the planes had appeared in Russia a little more than five years ago.
The expert said the A-320 was considered to be very safe aircraft because it had over four levels of protection.
"It is virtually impossible to 'kill' this plane," he said. "It is equipped with a fully autopilot mode and the plane itself controls climbing and other flight parameters."
He said that the human factor in a combination with an automatic landing system might have caused the crash, as the crew had to reprogram the system after an air controller in Sochi had ordered the plane to land at another runway.
"The main problem of this type of landing [automatic] is that it is impossible to check whether a new program is being run," he said.
