CAIRO/MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian airliner that crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula broke up in mid-air, an official of a Moscow-based aviation agency said on Sunday after visiting the disaster site, but stressed it was too early to draw conclusions from this.
Russian authorities also ordered Kogalymavia airline, operator of the Airbus A321 which came down on Saturday killing all 224 people on board, not to fly its jets of the same model until the causes of the crash are known.
The jet, which Kogalymavia flew under the brand name Metrojet, was carrying holidaymakers from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg when it crashed into a mountainous area of central Sinai shortly after losing radar contact near cruising altitude.
"The destruction happened in the air, and fragments were scattered over a large area of around 20 square kilometers," said Viktor Sorochenko, director of the Intergovernmental Aviation Committee. However, he warned against reading anything into this information. "It's too early to talk about conclusions," he said on Russian television from Cairo.
Exceedingly rare
In-flight breakups are exceedingly rare for modern airliners such as the Metrojet Airbus A321 involved in the crash.
According to media reports, the 18-year-old jet disappeared from radar while flying at 31,000 feet — 20 minutes after taking off from the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.
The most publicized recent breakup of an airliner mid-flight is the crash of Malaysia Airlines MH17, which was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Ukraine in July 2014.
A local ISIS affiliate has taken responsibility for the crash, but investigators have said it is unlikely that the group has the training or weapons necessary to take down a plane flying at that altitude.
Three carriers based in the United Arab Emirates airlines - Emirates, Air Arabia and flydubai - said on Sunday they were re-routing flights to avoid flying over Sinai. Two of Europe's largest carriers, Lufthansa and Air France-KLM, have already said they would avoid flying over peninsula while awaiting an explanation of the cause.
But there are also less nefarious reasons that could cause an airliner to break apart. In 2002, China Airlines Flight 611, broke apart over the Taiwan Strait at 35,000 feet, killing 225 people. The cause of the crash was eventually attributed to structural failure resulting from improper repairs made to the plane after its tail was damaged during a landing 20 years earlier.
According to the Air Safety Network, records indicate the Airbus A321 involved in Saturday's crash also suffered a tail strike in November 2001 while landing in Cairo. However, it is unclear if the incident has any causal relationship to the Sinai crash.
At this point in the investigation, it is too early to make any conclusion as to what may have caused the incident. However, investigators will have much to work with once they extract the information from the aircraft's flight-data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
The A321 is a medium-haul jet in service since 1994, with over 1,100 in operation worldwide and a good safety record. It is a highly automated aircraft relying on computers to help pilots stay within safe flying limits.
Airbus said the A321 was built in 1997 and had been operated by Metrojet since 2012. It had flown 56,000 hours in nearly 21,000 flights.
The aircraft took off at 5:51 a.m. Cairo time (1151 EDT) and disappeared from radar screens 23 minutes later, Egypt's Civil Aviation Ministry said in a statement. It was at an altitude of 31,000 feet (9,400 meters) when it vanished from radar screens.
According to FlightRadar24, an authoritative Sweden-based flight tracking service, the aircraft was descending rapidly at about 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) per minute when the signal was lost to air traffic control.
