Metrojet Flight 9268

Metrojet Flight 9268 was an international chartered passenger flight, operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia (branded as Metrojet). On 31 October 2015, at 06:13 local time EST (04:13 UTC), an Airbus A321-231 operating the flight exploded above the northern Sinai Peninsula following its departure from Sharm El Sheikh International Airport, Egypt en route to Pulkovo Airport, Saint Petersburg, Russia. All 224 passengers and crew on board were killed. The cause of the crash was most likely an onboard explosive device as concluded by Russian investigators.

Most of the people aboard the flight were tourists. There were 212 Russians, four Ukrainians, and one Belarusian passenger. There were also 7 crew members on board. Investigators believe that a bomb was put on the aircraft at Sharm El Sheikh, with the goal of causing airlines to suspend flights to that airport.

Shortly after the crash, the Islamic State's Sinai Branch, previously known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, claimed responsibility for the incident, which occurred in the vicinity of the Sinai insurgency. ISIL claimed responsibility on Twitter, on video, and in a statement by Abu Osama al-Masri, the leader of the group's Sinai branch. ISIL posted pictures of what it said was the bomb in '' Dabiq'', its online magazine.

By 4 November 2015, British and American authorities suspected that a bomb was responsible for the crash. On 8 November 2015, an anonymous member of the Egyptian investigation team said the investigators were "90 percent sure" that the jet was brought down by a bomb. Lead investigator Ayman al-Muqaddam said that other possible causes of the crash included a fuel explosion, metal fatigue, and lithium batteries overheating. The Russian Federal Security Service announced on 17 November 2015 that they were sure that it was a terrorist attack, caused by an improvised bomb containing the equivalent of up to of TNT that detonated during the flight. The Russians said they had found explosive residue as evidence. On 24 February 2016, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi acknowledged that terrorism caused the crash.

In March 2020, an Egyptian appeals court ruled the crash was not an act of terrorism, and it dismissed lawsuits against government officials, Metrojet and Ingosstrakh. The appeals court ruled that the identities of the 224 victims had not been officially established and it was impossible to issue compensation to them as a result.

Aircraft

The aircraft was an 18-year-old Airbus A321-231, serial number 663. It first flew on 9 May 1997 and was delivered new to Middle East Airlines on 27 May 1997 with registration F-OHMP. In 2003, it was leased by Onur Air and, beginning in 2007, it was subleased to Saudi Arabian Airlines and other carriers and was registered as TC-OAE. In April 2012, Kolavia acquired the aircraft with a new registration of EI-ETJ and transferred it to Kogalymavia in May.

On 16 November 2001, while operating Middle East Airlines Flight 304, the aircraft suffered a tailstrike while landing in Cairo, Egypt. Neither the crew nor the passengers were injured, but the damage was severe. Within three months, the aircraft was repaired and returned to service.

At the time of the crash, the aircraft was owned by Dublin-based AerCap and leased to Kolavia. The aircraft had accumulated 56,000 flight hours on nearly 21,000 flights.

Passengers and crew

Flight 9268 was carrying 217 passengers, of which 25 were children, plus seven crew members. The captain of the flight was 47-year-old Valery Yurievich Nemov and the first officer was Sergei Stanislavovich Trukhachev. According to the airline, captain Nemov had amassed more than 12,000 hours of flight time, including 3,800 hours on this aircraft type. First officer Trukhachev had 5,641 hours of flight time, including more than 1,300 hours on the aircraft type.

The Russian embassy confirmed that most of the passengers were Russian. There were also one Belarusian and four Ukrainian passengers on board. Most of the passengers were tourists returning from Red Sea resorts. The Association of Tour Operators of Russia released the passenger manifest of all those thought to have been on the flight. The majority of the passengers were from northwest Russia, including Saint Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad, Novgorod and Pskov oblasts. A great number of children were orphaned by the crash as many parents on the flight had left their children behind in Russia.

Crash

Flight 9268 left Sharm El Sheikh airport at 05:50 EST (03:50 UTC) for Pulkovo Airport in Saint Petersburg, Russia, with 217 passengers and seven crew members on board. The aircraft failed to make contact with Cyprus Air Traffic Control 23 minutes later.

The Islamic State's Sinai branch said that it brought down the airliner. Wassim Nasr, France 24's expert on jihadi movements, said that the IS group has never claimed an attack they did not commit. Russian media outlets said that the pilot reported technical problems and had requested a landing at the nearest airport before the A321 went missing. This claim was disputed by other sources, including the Egyptian authorities, and subsequent analysis of the flight recorder data confirmed that no distress or diversion request was given. The Egyptian Civilian Aviation Ministry issued a statement that indicated the flight was at an altitude of when it disappeared from radar screens after a steep descent of in one minute. Flightradar24 shows the aircraft climbing to at before suddenly descending to at approximately north east of Nekhel, after which its position was no longer tracked. A bomb exploded in the aircraft, causing uncontrolled decompression, and the aircraft disintegrated in mid-air. All 224 passengers and crew died.

Reuters quoted an unnamed security officer as saying that the aircraft had been completely destroyed. Wreckage was scattered over , with the forward section about from the tail, indicating that the aircraft had broken up during flight. Aerial images of the wreckage broadcast on RT indicated that the wings were intact until impact. The debris pattern, combined with an initial interpretation of the aircraft's abrupt changes in altitude and airspeed, reinforced the presumption that the aircraft's tail separated during flight and fell separately.

Response

Unnamed Egyptian authorities indicated that the first parts of the wreckage had been located. Fifty ambulances were sent to the crash site near Housna, from Sharm El Sheikh. Unnamed Egyptian officials reported that the aircraft "split in two" and most bodies were found strapped to their seats. Initial reports indicated that voices of trapped passengers could be heard in a section of the crashed aircraft. At least 100 bodies were initially found, including at least five children.

Investigation

Ayman al-Muqaddam, the head of the central air traffic accident authority in Egypt, was appointed to investigate the cause of the crash. In a statement on 31 October, he indicated that the pilot had made contact with the civil aviation authorities and asked to land at the nearest airport. He suggested the aircraft may have been attempting an emergency landing at El Arish International Airport in northern Sinai. On the same day, Egyptian Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamel said that air traffic control recordings did not show any distress calls, nor change of route requests by the pilots. The President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, said that a probe of the crash would take months. Furthermore, on 31 October the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters was activated, providing for the humanitarian retasking of satellite assets.

The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations sent three of its aircraft to the crash site. The Investigative Committee of Russia also started a legal case against Kogalymavia under legislation regulating "violation of rules of flights and preparations." Kogalymavia's employees were also questioned, along with those of the Brisco tour agency that had chartered the flight. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry promised to work closely with Russian officials and investigators to find the cause of the accident. The aircraft had passed technical checks before taking off. Investigators would also view the security camera footage. Soon after the crash, Russia's regional transport prosecutors determined that the quality of fuel on the aircraft met required standards.

The aviation accident investigation agencies BEA (France), BFU (Germany), and AAIU (Ireland) participated in the investigation as representatives for the state of the aircraft's design, manufacture, and registration respectively. The BEA sent two investigators, accompanied by six representatives from Airbus, to Egypt on 1 November. According to the BEA, they joined two investigators from the BFU and four investigators from the Interstate Aviation Committee, their Russian counterpart, representing the state of the aircraft's operator.

Both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder were recovered from the crash site on 1 November. Russian Transport Minister Maksim Sokolov and a team of specialist investigators arrived in Cairo to assist the Egyptian investigators in determining the cause of the crash. The flight data recorders were reported to be in good condition. On 4 November, Egypt's Civil Aviation Ministry Investigators reported that the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was partially damaged and much work was required to extract data from it. The CVR indicated that everything was normal until a sudden disastrous event. An explosion or other sudden loud noise was heard very shortly before the recorder stopped recording.

The Egyptian search and rescue team had found 163 bodies by 1 November. As the search area widened, the Egyptian team found the body of a child about from the wreckage, indicating that the aircraft had broken up in mid-air, confirmed by Russian investigator Viktor Sorochenko.

An unnamed official quoted by Reuters said that Flight 9268's tail section separated from the main body of the fuselage and was burning, which could indicate an explosion. According to a senior US defence official speaking on 2 November, a US infrared satellite detected a heat flash at the time and place of the disaster, and the US intelligence community believed that it could have been an explosion on the aircraft, by either a fuel tank or a bomb and the satellite imagery also ruled out a missile attack. US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that there was not yet any "direct evidence of terrorist involvement". Some UK news outlets reported that an ISIL bomb was the most likely explanation for the crash.

Within a week of the crash, serious considerations were given to the notion that the plane had been intentionally brought down. The UK government said that in the light of further British intelligence, the crash "may well have been caused by an explosive device". British aviation experts travelled to Egypt to assess airport security; the UK government Cobra emergency committee, chaired by the Prime Minister, considered their findings. The BBC reported that the British government thinks the incident was probably caused by terrorism based on intercepted transmissions between militants based in Sinai. These transmissions suggest that a bomb was put in the hold prior to takeoff. Although the British have not ruled out a technical fault, the BBC reports that is "increasingly unlikely". Paul Adams, BBC world affairs correspondent, said that Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesperson left little doubt that the British government believed the aircraft was brought down by a bomb. Adams said that suspending flights both to and from a foreign country and insisting on your own technical experts assessing security demonstrated a lack of confidence in that country's own security measures. Security experts and investigators have said the aircraft is unlikely to have been struck from the outside and Sinai militants are not believed to have any missiles capable of striking an airliner at .

At the same time, flights began to be stopped from and to Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt, causing around 20,000 British tourists to be stranded.

European investigators had found that the cockpit voice recorder data is consistent with an explosion and the flight data recorder cuts off abruptly. On 8 November, Reuters quoted an unnamed Egyptian investigation team member, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the investigation, who said he was "90% sure" the airliner was brought down by a bomb, based on an initial analysis of the last second of the cockpit voice recording. Lead investigator Ayman al-Muqaddam said that other causes, such as lithium batteries overheating, a fuel explosion, or metal fatigue in the structure, still needed to be definitively ruled out.

On 17 November 2015, the Russian security service chief Alexander Bortnikov announced that their investigation had concluded that a "terror act" brought down Metrojet Flight 9268 after traces of explosives were found in the wreckage. Spectral analysis was used among other methods to examine the substance found. According to Russian officials, an improvised explosive device with power equivalent to up to 1 kilogram of TNT brought down the flight. Russia offered a US$50 million reward for further information. Reuters reported that, according to security sources, two employees of Egypt's Sharm El Sheikh airport had been detained for questioning over the crash on suspicion of putting a bomb on board the flight. Egyptian authorities denied this.

On 18 November 2015, ISIL published pictures of what it claimed was the type of bomb in its '' Dabiq'' online magazine, claiming to show the three IED components including a Schweppes soda can containing the explosive charge, a military-grade detonator and switch. In the same month Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu announced that the Sinai branch of ISIL was responsible for downing of the flight.

On 14 December 2015 the Egyptian committee investigating the crash issued a preliminary report. The leader of the committee said that it had so far found "no evidence that there is an act of terror or illegal intervention". In response to the statement by the investigating committee, Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov