MOSCOW, May 3 (RIA Novosti) - A total of 113 people are presumed dead after an Armenian-owned Airbus airliner plunged into the Black Sea in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
The A-320 passenger jet, which was flying from the Armenian capital, Yerevan, to an airport servicing the popular Russian resort of Sochi, disappeared from radar screens at 2:15 a.m. local time (Tuesday 10:15 p.m. GMT).
Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said the most likely cause of the crash was bad weather - the Armavia Airlines plane had reportedly been trying to make a second attempt to land in heavy rain - and an expert with Russia's Air Traffic Organization concurred that poor visibility might have caused the accident.
"These were the actual weather conditions at the moment of the crash: the lowest level of cloud lay at 100 meters, visibility was at four kilometers, and it was raining heavily," the expert said.
Prosecutors ruled out the possibility of a terrorist attack and a representative of the Interior Ministry in the southern Krasnodar Territory said investigators were considering three versions.
"We are considering several versions: a mistake made by the pilot, a technical malfunction or a mistake by air traffic controllers," Igor Zhukov of the North Caucasus transport police said.
However, Artyom Movsisyan, the head of Armenia's main civil aviation department, ruled out the possibility of a technical error. He said the A-320 had undergone a complete technical overhaul in April 2006, and experts from Sabina Technics had given a positive conclusion on its technical condition shortly before takeoff.
Movsisyan said the plane had been filled with 10 metric tons of fuel and a flight to Sochi lasting less than an hour needed only 3.5 tons.
Armavia Airlines, which increased the number of passengers it carried last year by over 30% to 507,000, said it had leased the plane from Vermille International Services B.V. in 2004. Before leasing, the passenger jet, which was manufactured in 1995, underwent a technical overhaul in Bordeaux, France, the company said.
Experts from Toulouse-based Airbus will arrive in Russia to work with investigators from Russia and Armenia to establish what caused the crash.
Krasnodar prosecutor Sergei Yeremin said the plane's flight data recorders, which could help explain the crash, had not been discovered.
The Emergency Situations Ministry said work on recovering the black box flight recorder from a crashed Armenian airliner would start soon, and that the precise location of the plane's remains had been determined.
"At present we can say with certainty that we have found the precise location at which the aircraft fell," an official said. "Pieces of the plane have been found at a depth of 500-600 meters [about 1,750 feet]."
But experts said there was little hope of recovering the black box from the downed airliner.
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.
According to the emergency services, about 500 rescuers are working at the scene in adverse conditions to recover bodies from the crash site.
Yevgeny Serebryakov, a deputy minister of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, said, "The rescue operation is continuing despite poor weather."
Rescuers have recovered 46 bodies that have been sent for identification.
"The bodies of 46 people have been retrieved so far, [and] the identification process has started," Krasnodar Prosecutor Yeremin said.
The recovery operation involves about 20 boats and a Be-200 amphibious aircraft, the ministry said, adding that two more Be-200s would fly to the scene if necessary.
Families of the victims have started gathering at Sochi airport. More than 70 relatives have already arrived from Armenia and more are expected, a regional coastal guard officer said.
Medical aid is being provided to families of the victims staying at Yerevan's Zvartnots airport while the bodies of their relatives are being recovered from the sea, airport doctor Lyudmila Avakyan said.
"Airport workers also need medical and psychological aid because it was our crew and our stewards," Avakyan said.
Armenia's parliament has decided to set up a working group to provide assistance to the victims' families. In particular, members of parliament will collect donations.
May 5 and 6 have been declared mourning days in Armenia, and May 5 in Russia.
