MOSCOW, May 13 (RIA Novosti) - The recovery of flight recorders from the Armenian Airbus airliner that crashed off Russia's Black Sea coast last week, killing all 113 people on board, will start May 16, Russia's transport minister said Saturday.
Igor Levitin said special equipment, which is currently in the port of Novorossiisk, would be delivered to the scene shortly. It will be prepared for the operation in Sochi, the resort city not far from the scene, Monday, he said.
The effort to recover the objects, believed to be the black boxes that are crucial for explaining the cause of the crash, may take two or three days, the minister said.
"It depends on weather conditions," he said.
Levitin said the recorders could be at a depth of 496 meters (1,627 feet), and visibility was good enough for the recovery effort. The distance between the recorders was reported at about five meters (16 feet).
An emergency official said earlier in the day that searchers had received images of objects believed to be parts of the crashed airliner from a new Kalmar deep-sea search vehicle working at the scene to locate pieces of the wreckage and the flight recorders.
"The objects are presumably parts of the airliner. They have been found with the same coordinates as the radio signals believed to be coming from the flight recorders," he said.
The Airbus, owned by Armenia's Armavia airline, crashed in stormy weather near Sochi on May 3.
