SOCHI, May 4 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's transportation minister said Thursday the flight recorders from an airliner that crashed off Russia's southern coast Wednesday with the loss of 113 people were too deep in the sea to be recovered with available equipment.
The black boxes of the Armenian plane are at a depth of 680 meters (2,230 feet), and there is no available equipment in southern Russia that could recover them, Igor Levitin said.
On Thursday, French experts picked up a radio signal that could be coming from the black boxes of the crashed plane. They said the signals had been included in the design of the plane to make it easier to identify the location of the flight recorders after a possible crash.
"Many fragments have been discovered where the signal was established," Levitin said. "We believe this is where the disaster happened."
The minister said a request would be sent to the Navy to find the necessary equipment.
"There is an experimental model in the north of the country, and we will try to deliver it to the operation site," he said. "It can work at a depth of 500 meters [1,640 feet]."
He said the operation involved a Be-200 aircraft searching the coastal line. Levitin added that recovery teams had reached Loo, a town 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the popular resort of Sochi and would now move back to Adler, the airport servicing Sochi where the Airbus had been trying to land when it crashed in poor weather.
Sergei Kudinov, the head of the southern regional center of the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry, said international technologies would be used to lift the black boxes from such a depth.
"We will employ international technologies, in particular, from France, the U.S. or Norway," he said.
