A senior manager of the Kogalymavia air carrier, whose A321 passenger liner crashed in Egypt last Saturday, has blamed the disaster on major damage caused to the plane’s frame in flight.
"The plane went out of control. It was not flying. It was falling," said Viktor Yung, Kogalymavia’s deputy CEO. "Apparently, by that time it had suffered considerable damage that did not allow it to proceed with the flight."
Yung noted that the aircraft, apparently, fell apart when still in the air as a result of excessive G-force effects caused by the free fall.
"It takes really strong G-force effects to cause a plane to fall apart. A human body cannot stand such overloads," he added.
He argued that "no combination of failures in the plane’s systems might have caused the plane to disintegrate in the air."
Decompression alone would certainly not have caused the air crash, he said.
The Egyptian authorities will be investigating the A-321 passenger jet disaster over the Sinai Peninsula in cooperation with Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee and air transport authority Rosaviatsiya.
The Investigative Committee is proceeding with all lines of inquiry, including a technical failure.
Earlier, the Russian liner had undergone overhaul in Ireland. All documents related to this procedure may prove useful for Russian and Egyptian investigators. Ireland, where the A-321 plane was registered, has already declared the intention to dispatch its own experts to Egypt to look into the causes of the tragedy.
The crew of the A321 plane that crashed in Egypt on October 31 did not report any emergencies onboard, Viktor Yung went on to say.
"When the catastrophic situation started unveiling, the crew completely lost working ability. That is the explanation for the fact that no attempts were made to contact [air traffic controllers] and report an emergency onboard," Yung said.
No complaints in log book
Kogalymavia airline’s deputy general director Andrey Averyanov said there were no complaints of technical nature in the log book of the crew of the Russian passenger airliner.
"The crew’s captain, who was on the ill-fated flight, did not register any complaints in the log book before the flight and the copy of the page is kept by the airport’s service," Andrei Averyanov, the airliner’s deputy director general on the technical and manufacturing issues, told journalists.
"The plane took off exactly on schedule and it means that the crew was not taking any actions or procedures different from the standard ones," he said.
According to the company official systemic checks rule out the possibility of developing "fatigue cracks" on the A321 plane that crashed in Egypt.
"Works on assessing fatigue cracks are conducted on planes once in six years, and more detailed examination is made every 12 years. While designing the plane, certain norms of airworthiness are used that guarantee that no fatigue crack can develop to a critical size during the interval," Averyanov said.
He added that the plane underwent the last checks in March 2014.
Russian Kogalymavia’s A321 plane en route from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg crashed on October 31 around 30 minutes after takeoff in North Sinai, 100 kilometers to the south of Al-Arish. Flight 9268 carried 217 passengers and seven crewmembers. Egyptian authorities said no one survived in the crash.
