MOSCOW – An Armenian passenger plane crashed in stormy weather early today off Russia’s Black Sea coast as it was headed in for landing, killing all 113 people on board, emergency officials said.
The Airbus A-320, which belonged to the Armenian airline Armavia, disappeared from radar screens less than four miles from shore and crashed after making a turn and heading toward the Adler airport near the southern Russian city of Sochi, Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said. Rescue officials in the ministry’s southern regional branch said all 113 people aboard the plane, including six children, were killed.
Wreckage from the plane was found near the shoreline, Beltsov said, and salvage workers said the fuselage was found at a depth of nearly 1,500 feet.
The plane disappeared from radar about 2:15 a.m. local time during a flight from Yerevan to Sochi, a resort city on the Black Sea in southern Russia, Beltsov said.
Beltsov said the plane went down while trying to make a repeat attempt at an emergency landing; the Interfax news agency quoted the Russian air control agency as saying that the plane’s crew had not reported an emergency.
Andrei Agadzhanov, Armavia’s deputy commercial director, said the crew had communicated with Sochi ground controllers while the plane was flying over the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. The ground controllers reported stormy weather but told the crew the plane could still land, the representative said.
Just before the landing, however, the ground controllers told the crew to circle again before approaching the airport. Then the plane crashed.
He said the crew was experienced and the stormy weather was “certainly” the cause.
Rescuers found parts of the plane some four miles from the shore, along with empty life jackets – an indication that passengers had no time to put them on, the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted an unidentified local emergency official as saying. Rough seas, driving rain and low visibility were hampering the search, Russian news agencies reported.
Agadzhanov said the airline’s deputy general director, Vyacheslav Yaralov, had been aboard.
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