Plane's engine working before Black Sea crash

The Armenian airliner that crashed into the Black Sea last month killing all 113 people aboard was intact, with its engines operating normally and enough fuel to land prior to impact, a Russian investigating commission said today.

The Armavia Airbus A320 was also under manual control by its pilots up to the moment of the May 3 pre-dawn catastrophe near the Russian port of Sochi, the Transport Ministry commission said in a statement.

The commission, which based its conclusions on an analysis of the plane’s “black box” flight recorders, did not assign blame for the crash.

Prosecutors have dismissed the possibility that terrorists had brought the plane down, and officials point to rough weather or pilot error as the likely cause.

Armavia officials have suggested that air traffic controllers were at least partly to blame, for giving the pilots improper instructions.

The commission said it planned further analysis of the recorders and computer modelling to determine a cause. The flight was en route to Sochi from the Armenian capital, Yerevan.