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Russian transport minister dampens air crash black box hopes

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MOSCOW, May 5 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's transportation minister played down hopes Friday that recovery teams would quickly find the flight recorders of an Armenian Airbus that crashed into the Black Sea two days ago killing 113 people.

The black boxes are seen as the key to discovering the cause of the tragedy, which stuck in the early hours of Wednesday morning, but Igor Levitin said an unprecedented recovery operation would have to be conducted to reach parts of the plane at a depth of 680 meters (2,230 feet).

"I am not prepared to speak now [on the chances of recovering the plane]," Levitin said. "Yesterday we studied global statistics on air crashes at sea for the last 10 years. There has been no case when an airliner has been recovered from such a depth."

Aviation experts were pessimistic about the chance of finding the flight recorders in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.

Rudolf Teimurazov, the chairman of the Interstate Aviation Committee, said attempts to locate the black boxes of a Russian Tu-154 airliner that was accidentally shot down by a Ukrainian missile over the Black Sea in 2001, had been unsuccessful.

"I am skeptical about the possibility of finding something on the Black Sea seabed at a distance of over one kilometer from the coast," he said Wednesday, adding that there was a huge layer of sulfuric hydride sludge near the seafloor.

"After the Tu-154 was shot down, we found no more than 3% of the wreckage and could not even dream of [finding] the flight recorders," he said.

The Emergency Situations Ministry said Thursday that Airbus experts had picked up signals from two radio beacons in the crash zone, raising hopes that the data recorders might be recovered, though officials said origin of the signals was unknown.

The ministry also said Friday that 50 bodies had been recovered and 41 had been identified.

Gayane Davtyan, press secretary of Armenia's civilian aviation authority, said 21 bodies had been brought to Yerevan early Friday, which has been declared a day of mourning in both Russia and Armenia.

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