113 KILLED AS ARMENIAN AIRLINER CRASHES
By Steve Gutterman

AP
Published: 03 May 2006

An Armenian passenger plane carrying 113 people crashed early today
off Russia’s Black Sea coast as it was headed in for landing, killing
everyone on board, emergency officials said.

Armenian airline officials said they believed the crash was due to
the stormy weather, but Sergei Kubinov, the head of the southern
district office of Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry, said
that the age of the aircraft and technical factors could have been
involved. Investigators did not believe terrorism was a factor.

The Airbus A-320, which belonged to the Armenian airline Armavia,
disappeared from radar screens just under 4 miles from the shore
and crashed after making a turn and heading toward the Adler airport
near Sochi, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov
said. Rescue officials in the ministry’s southern regional branch said
the 113 people aboard the plane, including six children, were killed.

Wreckage from the plane was found not far from the shoreline, Beltsov
said, and salvage workers said the fuselage was found at a depth of
1,485 feet.

Search and rescue teams have pulled 18 bodies from the water, Kubinov
said; none were wearing life jackets, indicating they did not have
sufficient warning to prepare for an emergency landing.

Nineteen boats and divers were involved in the search, and a deep-sea
robot was to be used to try to recover the plane’s black box, he
said. The water temperature was 12 degrees Celsius (53 F).

The plane disappeared from radar screens at about 2.15am local time
(2215 GMT Tuesday) during a flight from Yerevan to Sochi, a resort
city on the Black Sea in southern Russia, Beltsov said.

He said that the plane went down while trying to make a repeat attempt
at an emergency landing. However, the Interfax news agency quoted
the Russian air control agency as saying that the plane’s crew had
not declared any emergency.

Armavia deputy commercial deputy Andrei Agadzhanov said in the Armenian
capital, Yerevan, that the crew had communicated with Sochi ground
controllers while the plane was flying over the Georgian capital,
Tbilisi. The ground controllers said there were poor weather conditions
but the plane could still land, the representative said. Just before
the landing, however, the ground controllers told the crew to make
another circle in the air before approaching the airport. Then the
plane crashed.

He said the crew was highly experienced, the airplane was in good
condition and that weather conditions were “certainly” the cause.

The Airbus A-320 was manufactured in 1995 and had been acquired on
leasing by the airline. The aircraft underwent full-scale servicing
a year ago.

The plane broke up on impact with the water, and wreckage was thrown
into a wide arc, Kubinov said.

Rough seas, driving rain and low visibility were hampering the search,
Russian news agencies reported.

There was no indication yet of the nationalities of the passengers
and crew.

Agadzhanov said that the airline’s deputy general director, Vyacheslav
Yaralov, had been aboard.

Relatives of those aboard the plane were gathering at the Yerevan
airport for a charter flight to Sochi.