MOSCOW, May 3 (RIA Novosti) - All 113 passengers and a crew are feared dead after an Armenian passenger plane crashed early Wednesday off Russia's Black Sea coast, emergency services said.
The Emergency Situations Ministry said that the Airbus A-320 had come down about six kilometers from the coast while heading for an airport in Adler, which services the resort of Sochi.
The cause of the tragedy remains unclear, but the investigators are pursuing two main versions: bad weather conditions and poor maintenance.
"The only thing [we] know is that when the crew asked for permission to land, the air controller in Sochi responded that bad weather meant this was not yet possible," Gayane Davtyan, head of Armenia's civilian aviation authority said. "Contact with the crew was lost at 600 meters, when the plane went to circle for a second time."
A total of 25 bodies from the wreckage of the plane have been recovered in an operation involving about 20 boats and a Be-200 amphibious aircraft, the emergency services said, adding that two more Be-200s would fly to the scene if necessary.
Armavia said the mid-range liner had been built in 1995 and the company had leased it from Vermille International Services B.V. since 2004 after it had been tested and refitted in Bordeaux, France.
The worst crash involving an two-engine A-320, which was first built in 1984 and remains the most popular Airbus on the market, occurred in August 2000, when a Gulf Air plane crashed off Bahrain on a flight from Cairo, killing all 143 people on board.
