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Govt Official To Fly To Sochi To Oversee Plane Crash Probe

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  • Govt Official To Fly To Sochi To Oversee Plane Crash Probe

    GOVT OFFICIAL TO FLY TO SOCHI TO OVERSEE PLANE CRASH PROBE

    ITAR-TASS, Russia
    May 10 2006

    MOSCOW, May 10 (Itar-Tass) --The head of Russia's Federal Agency for
    Sea and River Transport, Alexander Davydenko, will fly to the Black
    Sea resort city of Sochi on Wednesday to "supervise the operation to
    determine the exact location of the crashed plane," Transport Minister
    Igor Levitin said.

    "The plan of further steps will be approved by specialists together
    with the Emergencies Ministry, the Navy, and French colleagues,"
    the minister said.

    "Work will begin according to the approved schedule," Levitin said,
    adding that all the necessary equipment has already been delivered.

    Meanwhile, the search for the flight recorders from the crashed
    Armenian Airbus-320 in the Black Sea off Sochi has not stopped despite
    rough seas.

    Specialists plan to examine the seabed at a death of 450-800 metres
    where a large number of the plane's fragments and the "black boxes"
    are lying.

    The area where the debris are scattered is quite big and the French
    equipment will help to distinguish between the plane's fragments and
    personal belongings of the passengers.

    Earlier, a deep-water apparatus, Kalmar, traced four unidentified
    objects at the crash scene at the depth of 450 meters.

    "Four objects have been traced at the depth of 450 meters. They are
    being identified. The objects were found by a hydro-radar system
    of the Kalmar apparatus operated from the Zaliv towboat," Sergei
    Biryukov, Executive Director of the company Tetis Pro that designed
    the apparatus, told Itar-Tass.

    Flight recorders used on aircraft of the Airbus-320 type withstand
    the depth of up to 6,000 meters for 30 days, experts from the French
    air crash investigation bureau said on Sunday.

    They said that flight recorders' radio beacons keep working during
    the 30-day period.

    One of the flight recorders registers flight parameters, including the
    speed, height and direction of the flight and the autopilot operation,
    each second. The other gadget records conversations in the cockpit.

    Each flight recorder weighs 10 kilograms, including a seven-kilogram
    armoured casing for the gadget. The casing can withstand water pressure
    at a depth of 6,000 meters, the temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius,
    and the compression of 2.2 tonnes.

    The French experts think that flight recorders from the Armenian
    Airbus-320 are lying at a depth of 680 meters.

    The bureau retrieved flight recorders from the depth of over 1,000
    meters in the Red Sea in January 2004, when an Egyptian plane crashed
    near the Sharm-el-Sheikh resort. The rescuers were using a Scorpio
    deep-water apparatus.

    A technical commission investigating the Sochi air crash, which is
    led by the CIS Interstate Aviation Committee, has asked French experts
    to help find A-320 flight recorders.

    Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said, "The Frenchmen have
    appropriate equipment and they are ready to quickly bring it to the
    crash scene."

    Of 113 people who were abroad the plane, 51 bodies have been found
    so far. On the fifth day after the crash, specialists say chances
    that the others will be found are quite small.

    The Airbus A-320 of the Armenian airline Armavia plunged into the
    Black Sea as it was making a landing manoeuvre in the early hours of
    May 3. The accident claimed the lives of 113 people.
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