SOCHI, May 3 (RIA Novosti, Sofya Brykanova) - The Prosecutor General's Office is starting analysis of an exchange between air traffic controllers and the crew of an A-320 plane that crashed early Wednesday, the transport minister said.
A total of 113 people are presumed dead after an Armenian-owned Airbus airliner plunged into the Black Sea in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
"The Prosecutor General's Office, jointly with our technical experts, will shortly begin to decode messages exchanged between air traffic controllers and the crew," Igor Levitin said, adding that flight recorders had yet to be found.
"If divers fail to raise fragments [of the airliner], special equipment will be provided that will do it independently," the minister said.
The Emergency Situations Ministry has sent sonar equipment to the scene that can detect objects on the seabed at a depth of up to three kilometers.
The A-320 passenger jet, which was flying from the Armenian capital, Yerevan, to an airport servicing the popular Russian resort of Sochi, disappeared from radar screens at 2:15 a.m. local time (Tuesday 10:15 p.m. GMT).
