MOSCOW, May 4 (RIA Novosti) - Airbus specialists plan to recover the flight recorders and all parts of an Airbus plane that crashed in the Black Sea Wednesday killing 113 people, the Russian transportation minister said Thursday.
An Airbus A-320 belonging to Armenia's Armavia Airlines flying from the country's capital, Yerevan, crashed about six kilometers from the Russian coast en route to an airport in Adler, which services the resort of Sochi. All 113 passengers and crew were killed.
Igor Levitin, speaking in an interview with government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta to be published Friday, said: "They do not intend to limit their activity to searching for black boxes, but also to recover all parts of the plane by themselves, as it is important for the manufacturer to establish whether the crash was linked with plane's technical state."
The European company equips its A-320 model with special radio beacons emitting signals at a certain frequency and at set intervals.
Levitin said a provisional analysis of the crew's communications with ground control suggested that bad weather was the most likely cause of the crash, adding that further analysis by Russian technical experts should provide a clearer picture of events.
Igor Levitin said earlier that parts of the plane had been found at a depth of 680 meters (2,230 feet). An emergencies ministry official said Airbus specialists working at the site had detected a radio signal, possibly from the plane's flight recorders. Two ministry teams are also working at the site, searching for signals.
