Russia has found the first flight recorder from a military plane that crashed into the Black Sea killing all 92 on board, the defence ministry said, amid unconfirmed reports that authorities had grounded all aircraft of the same type.



The recorder, one of several reported to be on board, contains information that could help investigators identify the cause of Sunday’s crash, which killed dozens of Red Army Choir singers and dancers en route to Syria to entertain Russian troops in the run-up to the new year.

Investigators have so far said that pilot error or a technical fault, rather than terrorism, were most likely to have caused the Tupolev-154 to crash into the sea.

The first black box, which was founded by a remote-controlled underwater vehicle at a depth of about 17 metres (55ft) and 1,600 metres (one mile) from the resort of Sochi, will be sent to a defence ministry facility in Moscow for analysis.

The defence ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that the flight recorder did not sustain considerable damage. The ministry says experts will need to clean the black box in distilled water before they begin to retrieve data from it.

“During the night during the [search operation] … a further five fragments of the plane were found,” the ministry said. They included pieces of fuselage and engine fragments.

The Interfax news agency cited an unnamed source as saying Russia had grounded all TU-154 planes until the cause of Sunday’s crash became clear. There was no official confirmation.

The defence ministry said the downed jet, a Soviet-era plane built in 1983, had last been serviced in September and underwent more repairs in December 2014.

Russian pilots say the TU-154 has a reasonably good safety record, though leading Russian commercial airlines have long since replaced it with western-built planes. The last big TU-154 crash was in 2010 when a Polish jet carrying the then-president Lech Kaczynski and much of Poland’s political elite went down in western Russia killing everyone on board.

Interfax, citing a law enforcement source, said a second flight recorder had also been found in the wreckage of Sunday’s crash, but not yet raised to the surface.

The defence ministry said search and rescue teams had so far recovered 12 bodies and 156 body fragments.