MOSCOW, May 5 (RIA Novosti) -Officials in three countries have said that a fuel shortage was unlikely to have caused an Armenian airliner to plummet into the Black Sea Wednesday with the loss of all 113 people on board.
The shortage appeared as a working theory during the investigation, along with bad weather, pilot error and mechanical failure, but several officials moved quickly to dismiss the idea.
Gennady Korotkin, a deputy emergency situations minister of Russia, said Thursday that a large slick of kerosene had led rescuers to the location of the wreckage, which indicated that the Airbus was carrying enough fuel to complete the hour-long flight from the Armenian capital, Yereva, to an airport servicing the popular Russian resort of Sochi.
"Initially, 13 boats were working in the area, so we can assume that its [the slick] size was significant," he said, adding that at present the slick has split into three smaller ones.
The Emergency Situations Ministry also said Friday morning that 50 bodies had been recovered from the crash zone and 41 of them had been identified.
Artyom Movsisyan, the head of Armenia's main civil aviation department, earlier ruled out a fuel shortage completely.
"The plane had about 10.2 metric tons of fuel, and the flight requires 3.5 tons at the most," he said. "It could land in Sochi and return to Yerevan without refueling."
The head of the Georgian air control agency, whose controllers had maintained contact with the pilot of the A-320, also said that the airliner had enough fuel, and Russian Transportation Minister Igor Levitin also said investigators were not considering a fuel shortage as a cause of the tragedy.
"We are not considering fuel shortage [as the cause] at this point," he said. "We will be able to find out only after we recover the black boxes."
Levitin also said that Russia was hoping to raise wreckage using its own equipment, though he said the authorities might ask other countries for help.
"We are holding talks with all services in Russia," Levitin said. "And if we do not find anything in Russia, we will turn to our Western colleagues."
The recovery operation involves more than 700 rescue workers, 40 boats, deep-sea vehicles, a Be-200 amphibious aircraft and a Ka-32 helicopter.
An experimental rescue boat, Katran, is expected to arrive at the scene to help locate parts of the wreckage and flight recorders.
"We have found the precise location of the crash," Levitin said, adding that the black boxes could be damaged by sulfuric hydride sludge near the seafloor at the depth of 680 meters (about 2,230 feet), so efforts were needed to retrieve them as soon as possible.
