Russian plane brought down by 'external force' in Sinai
Russia is saying that a Kogalymavia Airlines passenger jet that crashed in Sinai on Saturday while enroute from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg was brought down by an 'external force.' ISIS has claimed that it shot the plane down presumably as revenge for Russian military activity in Syria. All 224 passengers and crew on the plane were killed.Let's go to the videotape.
The airline apparently believes that ISIS is telling the truth.
"We exclude technical problems and reject human error," Alexander Smirnov, a Kogalymavia airline official, said at a Moscow news conference as he discussed possible causes of the crash.
He added that the crew did not issue any warnings or communications during the final moments, indicating that the flight crew must have been disabled and not able to radio out.
But no one else wants to believe that ISIS is responsible. No one, that is, except Lufthansa, Air France, Emirates, Air Arabia and Air Dubai, all of which have announced that they will not be flying over Sinai until further notice. This is from the first link.However, Smirnov said that while the plane's flight and voice data recorders had been recovered, they had not been read or decoded.
Officials have played down an apparent claim by Islamic militants in Sinai that they brought down the Airbus A321-200, saying technical failure is the most likely reason for the crash.
This is not the first flight out of Sharm to crash since Israel returned the resort to Egypt as part of the Camp David treaty. In 2004, a Flash Airlines charter flight from Sharm to Paris crashed into the Red Sea shortly after takeoff. A former work colleague of mine who had subsequently moved to France was aboard that flight.But so far, they haven't been able to give a definitive explanation for what happened, with the Egyptian President suggesting investigations could take months.
You might recall that in 2006, El Al announced that all of its planes are equipped with the Flight Guard anti-missile system. In 2008, American Airlines decided that the system was too expensive for its planes. Given that this is the second time in the last 16 months that a commercial passenger jet has been shot down, perhaps the airlines ought to consider installing the Flight Guard system.
Labels: anti-aircraft missiles, Egypt, ISIS, Islamic State, Islamic terrorism, Malaysia, Russia, Sinai, South Korea, Ukraine
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:49 PM
2 Comments:
sounds like the Jews will be blamed.
If you look at the flight pattern of this airplane, it was at 40,000 feet when it broke up. It is very unlikely that ISIS has weapons that can reach that high. The manpads that are possibly in the possession of ISIS can only reach 20,000 feet at most. I doubt that the plane was shot down, but it is certainly possible that there was a bomb on board.
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