GOVT OFFICIAL TO FLY TO SOCHI TO OVERSEE PLANE CRASH PROBE

ITAR-TASS, Russia
May 10 2006

MOSCOW, May 10 (Itar-Tass) –The head of Russia’s Federal Agency for
Sea and River Transport, Alexander Davydenko, will fly to the Black
Sea resort city of Sochi on Wednesday to “supervise the operation to
determine the exact location of the crashed plane,” Transport Minister
Igor Levitin said.

“The plan of further steps will be approved by specialists together
with the Emergencies Ministry, the Navy, and French colleagues,”
the minister said.

“Work will begin according to the approved schedule,” Levitin said,
adding that all the necessary equipment has already been delivered.

Meanwhile, the search for the flight recorders from the crashed
Armenian Airbus-320 in the Black Sea off Sochi has not stopped despite
rough seas.

Specialists plan to examine the seabed at a death of 450-800 metres
where a large number of the plane’s fragments and the “black boxes”
are lying.

The area where the debris are scattered is quite big and the French
equipment will help to distinguish between the plane’s fragments and
personal belongings of the passengers.

Earlier, a deep-water apparatus, Kalmar, traced four unidentified
objects at the crash scene at the depth of 450 meters.

“Four objects have been traced at the depth of 450 meters. They are
being identified. The objects were found by a hydro-radar system
of the Kalmar apparatus operated from the Zaliv towboat,” Sergei
Biryukov, Executive Director of the company Tetis Pro that designed
the apparatus, told Itar-Tass.

Flight recorders used on aircraft of the Airbus-320 type withstand
the depth of up to 6,000 meters for 30 days, experts from the French
air crash investigation bureau said on Sunday.

They said that flight recorders’ radio beacons keep working during
the 30-day period.

One of the flight recorders registers flight parameters, including the
speed, height and direction of the flight and the autopilot operation,
each second. The other gadget records conversations in the cockpit.

Each flight recorder weighs 10 kilograms, including a seven-kilogram
armoured casing for the gadget. The casing can withstand water pressure
at a depth of 6,000 meters, the temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius,
and the compression of 2.2 tonnes.

The French experts think that flight recorders from the Armenian
Airbus-320 are lying at a depth of 680 meters.

The bureau retrieved flight recorders from the depth of over 1,000
meters in the Red Sea in January 2004, when an Egyptian plane crashed
near the Sharm-el-Sheikh resort. The rescuers were using a Scorpio
deep-water apparatus.

A technical commission investigating the Sochi air crash, which is
led by the CIS Interstate Aviation Committee, has asked French experts
to help find A-320 flight recorders.

Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said, “The Frenchmen have
appropriate equipment and they are ready to quickly bring it to the
crash scene.”

Of 113 people who were abroad the plane, 51 bodies have been found
so far. On the fifth day after the crash, specialists say chances
that the others will be found are quite small.

The Airbus A-320 of the Armenian airline Armavia plunged into the
Black Sea as it was making a landing manoeuvre in the early hours of
May 3. The accident claimed the lives of 113 people.