Metrojet Flight 9268 was an international chartered passenger flight operated by Russian airline Kogalymavia (branded as Metrojet). On 31 October 2015, at 06:13 EST (04:13 UTC), the Airbus A321 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, making it the deadliest plane crash to involve the Airbus A320 family and the deadliest to occur in Egypt. Russian investigators concluded that the cause of the crash was most likely an onboard explosive device.
The passengers, most of whom were tourists, included 212 Russians, four Ukrainians and one Belarusian. The crew of seven were all Russian. Investigators believed that a bomb was placed in the aircraft at Sharm El Sheikh, with the goal of causing airlines to suspend flights to and from the airport.
Shortly after the crash, the Islamic State's Sinai Branch (IS-SP), previously known as Ansar Bait al-Maqdis, assumed responsibility for the incident, which occurred in the vicinity of the Sinai insurgency. IS-SP assumed responsibility on Twitter, on video and in a statement by Abu Osama al-Masri, the leader of the group's Sinai branch. IS posted photos 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 that the investigators were "90 percent sure" that the jet was destroyed 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 it was a terrorist attack caused by an improvised bomb containing the equivalent of up to 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of TNT. The Russians said they found evidence of explosive residue. On 24 February 2016, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi acknowledged that terrorism caused the crash.
In March 2020, an Egyptian appeals court ruled that the crash was not an act of terrorism, and it dismissed lawsuits against government officials, Metrojet and Ingosstrakh. The court ruled that the identities of the 224 victims had not been officially established and that it was thus impossible to issue compensation. No final report has been produced.
Aircraft
The aircraft was an 18-year-old Airbus A321-231, serial number 663, registered as EI-ETJ, manufactured in 1997. It had logged approximately 56,000 airframe hours and 21,000 takeoff and landing cycles.
On 16 November 2001, while operating as Middle East Airlines Flight 304, the aircraft suffered severe tailstrike damage while landing in Cairo, Egypt. 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.
Passengers and crew
Flight 9268 was carrying 217 passengers, of which 25 were children, plus seven crew members. The captain 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 the 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 and all of the crew members 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 large number of children were orphaned by the crash, as many parents on the flight had left their children behind in Russia.
Incident
Flight 9268 left Sharm El Sheikh at 05:50 EGY (03:50 UTC) on 31 October 2015 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.
Russian media outlets claimed 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 the claim was false. The Egyptian Civilian Aviation Ministry indicated the flight was at an altitude of 31,000 ft (9,400 m) when it disappeared from radar screens after a steep descent of 5,000 ft (1,500 m) in one minute. Flightradar24 shows the aircraft climbing to 33,500 ft (10,200 m) at 404 kn (748 km/h; 465 mph) before suddenly descending to 28,375 ft (8,649 m) at 62 kn (115 km/h; 71 mph) approximately 50 km (31 mi; 27 nmi) north east of Nekhel, after which its position was no longer tracked.
Wreckage was scattered over 20 square kilometres (8 sq mi; 6 sq nmi), with the forward section about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi; 2.7 nmi) from the tail, indicating that the aircraft had disintegrated 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 tail separated during flight and fell separately.
Response
Egyptian authorities reached the wreckage site within hours. Fifty ambulances were sent to the crash site near Housna, 300 kilometres (190 mi; 160 nmi) from Sharm El Sheikh. Unnamed Egyptian officials reported that the aircraft split in two and that most bodies were found strapped to their seats. Initial reports indicated that voices of trapped passengers could be heard in a section of the crash. 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 8 kilometres (5 mi; 4 nmi) from the wreckage, indicating that the aircraft had disintegrated in mid-air.
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 reveal any distress calls or route-change requests issued by the pilots. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said that an investigation would take months. 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. Investigators also viewed 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. On 4 November, Egypt's civil-aviation ministry investigators reported that the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was partially damaged and that 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 device stopped recording.
An unnamed official 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 U.S. defence official, an American infrared satellite detected a heat flash at the time and place of the disaster, and the American intelligence community believed that it could have been an explosion. U.S. 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.
Within a week of the crash, authorities began to believe that the plane was destroyed intentionally. 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, and the government's Cobra emergency committee, chaired by the prime minister, considered their findings. The BBC reported that the British government thought that the incident was probably caused by a bomb in the hold based on intercepted transmissions between militants based in Sinai. Although the British did not exclude a technical fault, the BBC reported that was "increasingly unlikely".
The United Kingdom stopped flights from and to Sharm El Sheikh, causing a number of British tourists to be stranded. Prime minister David Cameron's spokesperson communicated that the government believed the aircraft was destroyed by a bomb. 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 missiles capable of striking an airliner at 30,000 ft (9,100 m).
The cockpit voice recorder was sent to France, where its contents were downloaded by the BEA. The recording ends abruptly, consistent with an explosion on board. Reuters quoted an unnamed Egyptian investigation team member who was "90% sure" that the airliner was destroyed by a bomb, based on an initial analysis of the last second of the CVR recording. Lead investigator Ayman al-Muqaddam said that other causes, such as lithium batteries overheating, a fuel explosion or metal fatigue, had not yet been definitively excluded.
On 17 November 2015, Russian security service chief Alexander Bortnikov announced that explosives were found in the wreckage. Spectral analysis was employed to examine the substances. According to Russian officials, an improvised explosive device with power equivalent of as much as one kilogram of TNT destroyed the plane. Russia offered a US$50 million reward for further information. Reuters reported that two employees of Sharm El Sheikh airport had been detained for questioning, which Egyptian authorities denied.
On 18 November 2015, ISIL published pictures of what it claimed to be the type of bomb used in the explosion 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. That same month, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu announced that the Sinai branch of ISIL was responsible.
On 14 December 2015, the Egyptian investigators issued a preliminary report. The leader of the committee said that it had 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 reiterated that "our experts concluded this was a terrorist attack".
On 29 January 2016, Reuters reported that a mechanic was detained and suspected of planting the bomb, which he had been given by his cousin, a member of IS. Two policemen and a baggage handler suspected of helping the mechanic were also detained. None of the four had yet been prosecuted.
On 24 February 2016, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi acknowledged that terrorism caused the crash, saying, "Has terrorism ended? No... Whoever downed that plane, what did he want? Just to hit tourism? No. To hit relations. To hit relations with Russia."
Abu Osama al-Masri, leader of the Islamic State branch in the Sinai Peninsula, known as Wilayat Sinai, became a person of interest but was killed in June 2018 in an airstrike on an IS location.
Other hypotheses
Tailstrike and maintenance hypotheses
Airline officials excluded mechanical failure as the cause, but investigators did not reach the same determination. Natalya Trukhacheva, the ex-wife of copilot Sergei Trukhachev, said that her ex-husband had complained to their daughter about the aircraft's technical state.
The aircraft involved in the crash had suffered a tailstrike while landing in Cairo 14 years earlier. Some have drawn comparisons to Japan Air Lines Flight 123, which crashed into a mountain in 1985, seven years after the aircraft had suffered a tailstrike while landing. The tail section was improperly repaired, leaving the rear pressure bulkhead vulnerable to metal fatigue, which ultimately resulted in explosive decompression. Reports on the wreckage of Flight 9268 have suggested that a "clear break" occurred near the plane's rear pressure bulkhead, possibly indicating failure of the bulkhead.