GLITCH HALTS SEARCH FOR CRASHED JET
Sergey Ponomarev / AP
The Moscow Times, Russia
May 10 2006
Combined Reports
A man weeping as he holds roses during a ceremony on a ship at the
Black Sea crash site near Sochi on Friday.
The search for victims’ remains and flight recorders from the airliner
that crashed last week in the Black Sea was interrupted Tuesday as
a diving vehicle broke down, news agencies reported.
A Transportation Ministry official said Kalmar, a deep-sea device
that had been searching for the plane’s fuselage and the recorders,
would be fixed by late Tuesday and resume searching, RIA-Novosti said.
Some bodies are thought to be trapped in the fuselage. Authorities
believe it is about six kilometers off the coast.
The Armavia Airbus A320 went down early Wednesday near Sochi as it
was approaching Adler airport in a heavy storm.
The crash killed all 113 on board. Officials have blamed the crash
on bad weather and, possibly, human error.
The ministry official, who was not identified, did not elaborate on
what was wrong with the unmanned, Russian-made deep-sea device.
Meanwhile, equipment to help distinguish the flight recorders from
the fuselage was expected from France. Also, French specialists were
expected to assist in the search.
Vladimir Derkunov, head of the search effort out of Sochi, added
that the French equipment would help in the removal of the flight
recorders from the fuselage, RIA-Novosti said. The Russian ship
Navigator, which arrived Monday in Sochi from Novorossiisk, planned
to transport the French team and equipment to the disaster site.
As of Sunday, 47 out of 51 bodies retrieved from the water had
been identified, Interfax reported, citing officials at the search
operation’s headquarters in Sochi.
Russia and Armenia observed a day of mourning Friday.
“For us, the most important thing now is raising the bodies, because
we understand that for the victims’ relatives, not raising the bodies
or fragments would be an even bigger tragedy,” Transportation Minister
Igor Levitin said Friday.
The crash of the plane, which had been en route from Yerevan, the
Armenian capital, hit Sochi’s Armenian community particularly hard.
About 125,000 of Sochi’s 400,000 residents are ethnic Armenians.
Twenty-six of the victims were ethnic Armenians living in Sochi.
Another 70 or so victims were thought to be Armenian citizens.