Odd sounds, heat flash detected prior to Russian plane crash

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has dismissed as “propaganda” a claim by an affiliate of the Islamic State that it brought down a Russian charter plane over the Sinai Peninsula, as investigators in Cairo on Tuesday prepared to analyze data from the aircraft’s data recorders.

Director of US National Intelligence James Clapper said on Monday (Nov 2) that he knew of no direct evidence that terrorism was to blame for the weekend crash of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt.

The U.S. Embassy in Egypt instructed its staffers Tuesday not to travel anywhere in the Sinai Peninsula following Saturday’s crash of a Russian airliner that killed all 224 people on board. “The only explanation is a few kind of external action”, Smirnov told a news conference in Moscow, without elaborating, adding that the jet was in “excellent technical condition”.

The claim, however, has been denied by the Egyptian authorities.

Airport authorities said all 224 people aboard Metrojet Flight 7K9268 were Russian, the Russian news agency RIA reports.

“The speculation that this plane was brought down by a missile is off the table”, the official told NBC.

ReutersRussian Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov looks at debris from a Russian airliner at its crash site at the Hassana area in Arish city, north Egypt, November 1, 2015.

With no indication that those events played a role in the crash, Todd Curtis, a former safety engineer with Boeing, said investigators will be looking at more unusual events, such as an on-board fire or corrosion that caused a structural failure.

The plane’s black boxes, which were recovered at the crash site Saturday, have not yet been read or decoded, Smirnov said.

US intelligence source says the Sinai air disaster did not result from missile strike.

The Metrojet Airbus A321-200 was en route from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg when it went down over the northern Sinai Peninsula approximately 23 minutes after takeoff. Experts started retrieving data from the recorders on Monday, Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said. The black box recordings reveal the pilots had no time to send a distress signal.

Although a Malaysia Airlines jet was shot down from an altitude of 33,000 feet over Ukraine on July 17, 2014, presumably by separatist militants armed with sophisticated Russian-made anti-aircraft missiles, the Sinai militants aren’t known to possess armaments capable of such an attack.

“Rather than speculating on what may have led to this terribly tragic incident, we’re going to allow the investigation to move forward to try to get the bottom of what happened”, he said.