Debris from the Tu-154 plane carrying 91 people had been found 1.5 kilometres from the Black Sea coast at a depth of 50 to 70 metres.
Tu-154 was a ‘non-civilian’ plane carrying 83 passengers and eight crew members, and had taken off at 5.20am local time on Sunday towards the Syrian port city of Latakia when it lost contact with land.
The crash happened 20 minutes after the take off at around 5.40am local time, while the plane was ascending, and the crew didn’t signal anything was wrong.
A rescue team had found the crash site in the Black Sea near the coast of the Sochi.
“The chance of survivors on board the Tu-154 is virtually zero,” a Russian emergency services source told .
Russia’s RIA news agency, citing an unidentified security source, said preliminary data indicated that the plane had crashed because of a technical malfunction or a pilot error.
The three-engine medium-range airliner was produced by Russian aerospace and defence company Tupolev, and is one of the fastest civilian aircraft in use and widely used in extreme Arctic conditions.
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