IS in Egypt claimed to have shot down the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai

a reply to: SonOfThor

I'm usually not popular in these threads but yes I've noticed how much worse it is now. Comments like these by the airline and Intel officials just make it worse. No matter what now this is a cover up because of them.

a reply to: Zaphod58

That could certainly account for the unusual noises heard on the voice recorder just prior to the end, but the Quantas did not break apart in mid air. It landed safely.

en.wikipedia.org...

Qantas Flight 32 was a Qantas scheduled passenger flight which suffered an uncontained engine failure on 4 November 2010 and made an emergency landing at Singapore Changi Airport. The failure was the first of its kind for the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger aircraft. It marked the first aviation occurrence involving an Airbus A380. On inspection it was found that a turbine disc in the aircraft's No. 2 Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine (on the port side nearest the fuselage) had disintegrated. The aircraft had also suffered damage to the nacelle, wing, fuel system, landing gear, flight controls, the controls for engine No. 1 and an undetected fire in the left inner wing fuel tank that eventually self-extinguished.[1] The failure was determined to have been caused by the breaking of a stub oil pipe which had been manufactured improperly.

It sounds as if the engine became a sort of "machine gun" of parts, sprayed at the aircraft.

a reply to: ipsedixit

That's exactly what happens. It happened to Qantas and it happened here. The difference between Qantas, all the other uncontained failures, and this flight is that this flight had a large weakened point right in the path of the shrapnel. The others didn't.

a reply to: Zaphod58

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just not ruling out a bomb quite yet.

a reply to: ipsedixit

There's no reason to yet. The chance of it being one has shrank IMO though. They may find explosive residue tonight, or the smoking gun that points to engine failure tomorrow. Nothing should be ruled out yet, but indicators are pointing more one way than the other now IMO.

a reply to: Zaphod58

According to telegraph.co.uk:

Additionally, a judiciary source in the investigation team told Al Masry Alyoum, an Egyptian newspaper, that "the cause of the crash is an explosion at the engine. The reason of the explosion will be determined on the examination of the crash site and the test of the bodies."

If this is accurate then what you have been saying seems more likely.

I wondered if this was an engine shelling out when I first heard about this accident. The claim that the pilot was worried/complained about MX issues drew my attention to this idea. Nothing set off aircrew like recent work done to an engine or a known history of issues with an engine. An engine failure that could cripple the aircraft if the case failed to contain the blades and disks such as in United Airlines Flight 232.

According to France 24: (Translated from the French)

www.france24.com...

In Cairo, the investigators extracted data from one of the two black boxes, the flight parameters, while the one containing the crew's conversations, damaged, will require much work. Their review is expected to decide between the two hypotheses envisaged: technical failure or attack.

Now they say US &UK intel suggest it was a bomb on board.telegraph

a reply to: Peeple

They think it might have been a bomb. So far there is no physical evidence found of being one.

originally posted by: Peeple
Now they say US &UK intel suggest it was a bomb on board.telegraph

Maybe US and UK just want to change the public opinion in Russia, concerning the russian engagement in Syria ?

a reply to: Ove38

You mean while Putin claims one success after the other? Possible.

British PM says bomb likely caused Russian airliner crash

While I'm not seeing any direct evidence presented, this is a rather significant thing for Prime Minister Cameron to say.

Given the political and financial impacts of such a claim, Presidents Sisi and Putin are apparently not amused and have asked Mr. Cameron to wait for conclusive evidence before speculating about the cause of the crash.

Does Prime Minister Cameron know something we don't?


Edit: Sorry, this seems like basically the same story mentioned here, but from a different source. Whatever the case, they're tightening security at Sharm el-Sheikh.

The following link has an interesting diagram on it:

www.lefigaro.fr...



One can piece together a possible account of the last moments of flight KGL 9268.

At around 6:13:14 the plane levels off after a sharp increase in altitude at 6:12 (not shown in the diagram). Is 6:12 the time when the plane lost its tail and went into a sharp nose up attitude?

From 6:13:14 to 6:13:15, the space of a second, the plane climbs a few hundred feet, losing ground speed.

In the space of one second, from 6:13:16 to 6:13:17 the airspeed drops drastically from 450 knots to 186 knots and also loses 1500 ft. (approx) in altitude. All of this would be happening in a nose up attitude.

At 6:13:18 the engines (or engine) are gunning to increase speed up to 263 knots and altitude from just under 30,000 ft. to just over 33,000 ft., which suggests that tail, meaning the stump of the fuselage, while down, was not vertical.

After that 6:13:20 ground speed falls to 47 knots and airspeed to 256 knots and the plane begins to fall out of the sky.

All of this would have happened with the tail hanging down at some angle. Only the air resistance on the wings would have been holding the tail from dropping to a vertical position. As the plane tilted back the wings would lose efficiency and the thrust of the engines themselves would not hold the plane in the air.

Here's some more detail from the BBC about the bomb theory expressed by Prime Minister Cameron:

Russian plane crash: UK suspects bomb was placed in hold

While this still seems to be a theory, it also seems unlikely that Mr. Cameron would want to go on record -- even with weasel words included -- about something like this without something reasonably concrete to back it up.

Not that it is unprecedented for a British Prime Minister to say things that later turned out to be false, but I suspect the UK has more evidence to support this theory than has so far been publicly disclosed.

Or not. Time will tell.

a reply to: Majic

As I said in the other threads, it no longer matters. They've destroyed any credibility the investigation had. No matter what they say at this point, it's just a cover up because the UK and US said it was a bomb.

Apparently the bomb theory is being, tentatively at least, confirmed by what is on the flight recorders, according to a French source close to the investigating team.

www.theguardian.com...

However, AFP quotes sources close to the investigation as saying that evidence from the plane’s “black box” flight recorders “strongly favours” the theory that a bomb on board brought it down.

One of the black boxes recovered from the crash site shows that the plane suffered “a violent, sudden” end, a source tells the agency.

The flight data recorder shows that “everything was normal during the flight, absolutely normal, and suddenly there was nothing”, it quotes an unnamed source as saying.

France 2 quotes an investigator (in French) with access to the flight recorders as saying that an explosion was distinctly audible and that it would not have resulted from an incidence of engine failure.

French experts from Airbus are part of the investigating team.

Le Figaro, quotes the French source close to the investigation, as follows (translation):

www.lefigaro.fr...

"The black boxes of the device made it possible to clearly hear the sound of an explosion during the flight", told France 2, an investigator who had access to flight recorders. The media added that the explosion would not have followed an engine failure, which would remove the hypothesis of an accident. Moreover, some pictures of debris show a device riddled with impacts from the inside to the outside of the aircraft, "which rather supports the theory of a pyrotechnic device," she has said.

Russian experts are doing scientific tests from swabs taken from the debris in Moscow, but results are not in yet.

tass.ru...

Russian Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov said that Russian experts had taken wipe samples from all the plane fragments and passengers’ luggage to trace possible explosives. "The necessary samples have been taken from all the elements where traces of explosives can be found. All these samples have been delivered to Moscow where they are being studied and analyzed by top class experts with the help of state of the art modern equipment. I can tell you with full responsibility that if there are traces of explosives, they will be found without fail," Puchkov said adding that all the findings would be published.

On the tass.ru website there is a small portfolio of photos of the debris from the crash of Flight 9268. One of the photos, #5, is of particular interest.

tass.ru...

It shows a section of the fuselage where the skin of the aircraft appears to be bubbled out, as if from internal pressure on it. This is not a result of explosive decompression, but rather the result of a supercompression of the inside of the aircraft which might result from the detonation of an explosive device.

In explosive decompression, the air inside the plane rushes out through a hole in its skin, causing further rupturing of the skin near the hole. This, plus the loss of aerodynamic shape, accompanied by increased wind resistance at the point of deformation of the skin might cause catastrophic failure of the aircraft. It would not cause a bubbling of the skin of the plane away from its suppporting frame. Only a supercompression of the interior atmosphere of the aircraft could cause this bubbling, if that is indeed what we are looking at in this picture.



This interpretation of the photo is strengthened, I believe, by what looks like an obvious interior to exterior perforation of the skin, as if something had been propelled violently through the aluminum to make the hole, which is clearly visible in this enlargement of photo number 5.



Of course everything in the photos might have happened on the ground as the wreckage tumbled around on impact, but the details shown here are coincident with an explosive detonation inside the aircraft.

It will be interesting to see if the Russian lab tests are able to confirm the presence of chemical indications of explosives. If they don't do that, it could get even more interesting.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Zaph, why would the government cause commotion by saying it 'might' be a bomb, when no evidence points to that yet...

and say for instance, the fact that bomb explosive residue is hard to miss and they've 'missed' it until they eventually find it... would that point to a cover-up?

To put it simply zaph, your theory sounds more plausible (to me anyways, atm) than what the governments and MSN 'suggest' might have been the cause!

So why would the MSN/gov entertain the less probable of scenarios??

For what it's worth, I think that if nobody but the Russians were involved in this situation, that they would try to conceal a successful terrorist attack on one of their civilian aircraft, in order to simplify the presentation of their foreign policy to their people. I think they would try to scapegoat the airline company involved in order to segregate this incident from their Syrian policy.

They were slow to react in stopping Russian civilian aircraft from flying to Egypt and have been at loggerheads with the Russian airline company, Kogalymavia/Metrojet, which stated that the aircraft was sound and that there were no abnormalities involved, an assertion, admittedly, disputed by the widow of one of the deceased pilots.

Russia doesn't want to (publicly) face this reality, in my opinion, although they are coming round to doing that, by canceling civil flights to Egypt.

I hope we will get an honest report out of the investigating team, but the political interests of various parties might prevent that.