All 224 people on the Airbus 321 - most of them Russians - died when it came down over the northern Sinai peninsula.
The country observed a day of mourning on Sunday after its worst air disaster.
Russian Air Transport Agency head Aleksandr Neradko has said the airliner disintegrated at high altitude.
The Kogalymavia plane was carrying 217 passengers, including 25 children, Russian transport authorities said. There were seven crew members on board.
Four of the passengers were Ukrainian nationals and one was from Belarus.
A Russian government transport plane carrying the remains of the victims landed at St Petersburg's Pulkovo airport on Monday morning.
Vehicles later began transporting the bodies to the city's crematorium for the identification by the relatives.
A second flight with more bodies is expected to arrive in St Petersburg in the evening.
Russia says it will pay compensation to the victims' families and help organise funeral procedures.
- What caused the crash?
- What we know
- KGL9268 crash: How it unfolded
- Russian media brood over cause of air crash
The plane crashed early on Saturday, shortly after leaving the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh for the Russian city of St Petersburg.
Debris was found across a 20sq km-wide (eight sq miles) area of Sinai, officials said. So far 163 bodies have been recovered.
The plane's flight recorders have been found and sent for analysis.
A number of major airlines - Emirates, Air France-KLM, Lufthansa, and Qatar Airways - have decided not to fly over the Sinai Peninsula until more information is available. Two smaller carriers, flydubai and Air Arabia, also said they would re-route flights, while Etihad Airways said it would avoid only "certain areas of airspace" over Sinai.
Germany's transport ministry has told German airlines not to follow the same route taken by the Russian plane.
British Airways said it regularly assessed the safety of its routes. BA said it would not confirm flight routes, but that it "would never fly a route unless it was safe to do so".
Russia's transport regulator said on Sunday it would check all the airline's A321 planes, but Kogalymavia said this would not affect their operations.
Egypt's civil aviation minister Hossam Kamal said there had been no sign of any problems on board the flight, contradicting earlier reports that the pilot had asked to make an emergency landing.
An Egyptian ground service official who carried out a pre-flight inspection of the plane said the aircraft appeared to be in good shape "We are all shocked. It was a good plane. Everything checked out in 35 minutes," the official told AP.
However, the widow of the plane's co-pilot told Russian TV her husband had complained about the aircraft's technical condition.
No comments:
Post a Comment