A Russian passenger plane carrying more than 220 people crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula
A Russian passenger plane carrying more than 220 people crashed in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula soon after taking off early Saturday from a Red Sea resort popular with Russian tourists and disappearing from radar screens, killing all on board, officials said.
The Airbus A-321 took off from Sharm el-Sheikh shortly before 6 a.m. with 217 passengers and seven crew members en route to St. Petersburg, Russia, and had been in the air for only 23 minutes when it crashed.
Ayman al-Muqadem, an Egyptian official with the government's Aviation Incidents Committee, said air controllers lost contact with the plane’s pilot after he radioed that the aircraft was experiencing technical problems and that he needed to make an emergency landing.
The jet then dropped off radar screens.
A ministry statement said Egyptian military search and rescue teams found the wreckage of the passenger jet in the remote mountainous Hassana area 44 miles south of el-Arish, an area in northern Sinai where Egyptian security forces are fighting a burgeoning Islamic militant insurgency led by a local affiliate of the Islamic extremist group ISIS.
A branch of ISIS claimed responsibility for downing the plane in a statement on Twitter, Sky News reported, adding that the claim had not been verified and it was unclear whether Sinai militants have the capability to attack a plane flying at a high altitude.
Russia's emergency ministry published a list of the passengers, ranging in age from a 10-month-old girl to a 77-year-old woman. A senior Egyptian aviation official said the charter flight was flying at 30,000 feet when communication was lost.
At Saint Petersburg's Pulkovo airport, family members awaited news. Ella Smirnova, 25, said she had been there to meet her parents.
"I spoke to them last on the phone when they were already on the plane, and then I heard the news.
"I will keep hoping until the end that they are alive, but perhaps I will never see them again."
A senior Egyptian air traffic control official said the pilot told him in their last communication that he had radio trouble.
Russian aviation official Sergei Izvolsky told Interfax news agency the aircraft took off from Sharm el-Sheikh at 5:51 am (0351 GMT).
He said it did not make contact as expected with Cyprus air traffic control.
"Communication was lost today with the Airbus 321 of Kogalymavia which was carrying out flight 9268 from Sharm el-Sheikh to Saint Petersburg," Izvolsky told Russian television networks.
"The plane departed Sharm el-Sheikh with 217 passengers and seven crew members. At 7:14 Moscow time the crew was scheduled to make contact with... Larnaca (Cyprus). However, this did not happen and the plane disappeared from the radar screens."
Metrojet, says it has two A320s and seven A321s, and that it carried 779,626 passengers in the first nine months of 2015, according to the Russian aviation agency Rosaviatsia.
Russia has a dismal air safety record, with charter operators often under pressure to book to capacity on ageing jets in an attempt to cut costs.
Kogalymavia is a small regional carrier that flies mostly international charter services.
The crash is likely to raise renewed concerns about the safety of air travel in a country with an ageing fleet of airliners.
The last major air crash in Egypt was in 2004, when a Flash Airlines Boeing 737 plunged into the Red Sea after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh. All 148 people on board, most of them French, died.
Millions of tourists, including many Russians, visit the resort, one of Egypt's major attractions for its pristine beaches and scuba diving.
It and other resorts dotting the Red Sea coast are heavily secured by the military and police, as an Islamist insurgency rages in north Sinai bordering Israel and the Gaza Strip since the army ousted president Mohamed Morsi in 2013.
(FOX)
