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A-320 tragedy victims' relatives to lay wreaths at crash scene

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  • A-320 tragedy victims' relatives to lay wreaths at crash scene

    ITAR-TASS News Agency
    TASS
    May 8, 2006 Monday 01:21 PM EST

    A-320 tragedy victims' relatives to lay wreaths at crash scene

    SOCHI


    The relatives of the passengers who died in the Armenian Airbus-320
    plane crash off Sochi last week will lay wreaths at the scene of the
    accident on May 9.

    Of 113 crash victims, 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.

    Meanwhile, the search for the flight recorders from the plane is
    continuing despite rough seas.

    ``Specialists will be examining the bottom at the place where the
    plane crashed with the help of sonar till night. French specialists
    will sail off into the sea tomorrow morning, at 7 a.m. Moscow time.
    They have already arrived in Sochi with equipment for a more precise
    search,'' an official at the search operation headquarters told
    Itar-Tass on Monday.

    The 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.''
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