ARMENIAN PLANE ‘DID NOT MALFUNCTION BEFORE CRASH’

Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
June 19 2006

The Armenian airliner that crashed into the Black Sea last month
killing all 113 people aboard was intact, had its engines operating
normally and had enough fuel to land, a Russian commission said Monday.

The Armavia Airbus A-320 was under manual control of its pilots up to
the moment of the May 3 pre-dawn catastrophe near the Russian port of
Sochi, the Transport Ministry commission investigating the disaster
said in a statement. The commission, which based its conclusions
after analyzing the plane’s "black box" flight recorders, did not
attribute blame for the crash.

Prosecutors have dismissed the possibility that terrorists brought
the plane down, and officials point to rough weather or pilot error
as the likely cause. Armavia officials have suggested that air traffic
controllers were at least partly to blame, giving the pilots improper
instructions.

The commission said it planned further analysis of the recorders and
computer modeling to determine a cause. The flight was en route to
Sochi from the Armenian capital, Yerevan.