SOCHI, Russia – Boats laden with bodies sailed into the palm-fringed harbor of this Russian resort Wednesday, carrying an Armenian airliner’s orange tail section and the remains of some of the 113 people who died when the plane tumbled into the Black Sea.
The plane went down about 2:15 a.m. in heavy rain and poor visibility as it was approaching the airport in Adler, about 12 miles south of this city wedged between the sea and soaring snowcapped mountains. Most of the dead were Armenians.
“I’ve lost my sweetheart, my son!” Anait Bagusian, 50, wailed at Zvartnots Airport in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, from which Armavia Airlines Flight 967 originated. Doctors hovered nearby because she swooned several times.
Authorities were investigating the cause of the crash as divers attempted to retrieve the Airbus A-320’s recorders from the deep, wave-chopped site about 31/2 miles offshore.
A spokeswoman for the Prosecutor General’s office, Nataliya Vishnyakova, dismissed the possibility of terrorism. Other officials pointed to the rough weather or pilot error as the likely cause. It is difficult even under normal conditions to land at the airport, which can be approached only from the sea.
Salvage ships battled stiff winds and heavy seas to try to recover bodies and fragments of the plane, which was leased by Armavia, Armenia’s largest airline. By evening, 47 bodies had been brought into the port and taken to morgues for identification.
The plane broke up on impact, and passengers’ personal belongings and plane fragments were found scattered over an area spreading a mile from the crash site.
Transport Minister Igor Levitin said the body of a child was the only passenger identified with certainty and that identifying the others would be difficult.
Airlines in former Soviet countries wracked up a grisly record of crashes in the 1990s, following the whittling off of much of Soviet monopoly carrier Aeroflot into hundreds of regional airlines plagued by scant money, aging equipment and cavalier disregard for safety. They often flew badly overloaded. In an infamous 1994 case, 75 people were killed in a crash reportedly caused by the pilot allowing his teenage son to take the controls.
In recent years, crashes from equipment failure or pilot error have declined sharply.
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