Russia has Grounded All Airbus A321
Russia has grounded Airbus A321 jets flown by the Kogalymavia airline, after one of its fleet crashed in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board.
The A321 is a medium-haul jet in service since 1994, with over 1,100 in operation worldwide and a good safety record. It is a highly automated aircraft relying on computers to help pilots stay within safe flying limits.
Airbus said the A321 was built in 1997 and had been operated by Metrojet since 2012. It had flown 56,000 hours in nearly 21,000 flights.
The aircraft took off at 5:51 a.m. Cairo time (0351 GMT) and disappeared from radar screens 23 minutes later, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said in a statement. It was at an altitude of 31,000 feet (9,400 meters) when it vanished from radar screens.
According to FlightRadar24, an authoritative Sweden-based flight tracking service, the aircraft was descending rapidly at about 6,000 feet (1,800 metres) per minute when the signal was lost to air traffic control.
Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail told a news conference late on Saturday that there did not appear to be any unusual activity behind the crash but added that the facts would not be clear until further investigations had been carried out.
Sokolov and a team of investigators arrived at the scene on Sunday and experts would begin examining the black boxes at the civil aviation ministry in Cairo within hours, judicial and ministry sources said. It was not clear how long the contents of the boxes, which record flight data and cockpit conversations, would take to retrieve.
A militant group affiliated to Islamic State in Egypt said in a statement that it brought down the plane “in response to Russian airstrikes that killed hundreds of Muslims on Syrian land”, but Russia’s Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov told Interfax news agency the claim “can’t be considered accurate”.
Islamic State, the ultra-hardline group that controls large parts of Iraq and Syria, has called for a holy war against both Russia and the United States in response to airstrikes on its fighters in Syria.
Sinai is the scene of an insurgency by militants close to Islamic State, who have killed hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and police and have also attacked Western targets in recent months. Much of the Sinai is a restricted military zone.
Militants in the area are not believed to have missiles capable of hitting a plane at 30,000 feet.
Islamic State websites have in the past claimed responsibility for actions that have not been conclusively attributed to them. Officials say there is no evidence to suggest so far that a bomb could have brought down the plane.
Three carriers based in the United Arab Emirates airlines – Emirates, Air Arabia AIRA.DU and flydubai – said on Sunday they were re-routing flights to avoid flying over Sinai. Two of Europe’s largest carriers, Lufthansa and Air France-KLM, have already said they would avoid flying over peninsula while awaiting an explanation of the cause.
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