SOCHI (Russia), May 3: All 113 passengers and crew on board an Armenian airliner were killed on Wednesday when the plane crashed into the Black Sea off the Russian coast as it tried to land in torrential rain.
The Airbus A320 vanished from radar screens at 2:15am (2215 GMT Tuesday) after ground controllers, who initially sent it away because of poor visibility, called it back and told the crew to make a second attempt at landing at Sochi.
Investigators blamed the bad weather for the crash and prosecutors ruled out a bomb.
As Armavia Flight 678 hit the sea it broke up.
Divers had the gruesome task of pulling bodies from the water.
In some cases, all they were able to retrieve was body parts.
Motorised dinghies criss-crossed heaving seas picking up jagged shards of fuselage.
The remains of the aircraft, including the tail fin showing the airline’s insignia and wrecked seats, were heaped on the quayside at Sochi.
The plane had been making a one-hour flight from the Armenian capital Yerevan. Most of the passengers were Armenian.
Relatives of the dead, hoping to collect their bodies and bring them home, arrived at Sochi’s airport on board special flights from Yerevan organised by the airline.
Russian television showed them crowding around a Russian rescue official.
When he said there were no survivors, one woman collapsed with grief and had to be helped away.
The plane had been carrying at least five children.
By evening 49 bodies and dozens of body parts had been retrieved, Russia’s Channel One television said.
Russia’s foreign ministry said 26 of the passengers were Russian passport holders and almost all the rest were Armenians.
An Armavia official said the aircraft had initially been refused permission to land because of torrential rain, but airport officials changed their minds.
As the plane attempted a second approach it vanished from radar screens near Sochi, which lies close to the Georgian border.
It crashed into the sea about six kilometres from the coast.
“Our initial information is that the only cause was the weather, for example poor visibility,” said Gayane Davtsian, a spokeswoman for Armenia’s state aviation authority.
Natalia Vishnyakova, a spokeswoman for Russia’s prosecutor-general, said on Rossiya television: “A terrorist act is completely ruled out.”
A day of mourning was declared in Armenia, a mountainous state of three million people, many of whom have relatives in southern Russia.
Television stations cleared their schedules and played sombre music.
“I was waiting for a call from my mother that she had arrived okay. But she didn’t phone, so I phoned myself and heard that this accident had happened,” said Khapet Tadevosyan, 32, at Yerevan airport.
“She flew to Sochi to see her sisters, whom she hadn’t seen for 15 years,” he said.
Russia’s Transport Minister Igor Levitin said work would go on through the night to recover bodies and search for the plane’s black box flight recorders.
Attempts to pin down the cause of the crash were hampered by rain, strong winds and the fact that most of the plane had sunk to the seabed, about 500 metres down.
Airbus said it would be sending six specialists to help with the investigation.
The Airbus A320, a twin-engined aircraft that seats 150 passengers, entered service in 1988.—Reuters
