The Russian Metrojet aircraft lost in north-central Sinai today was a leased Airbus A321 that entered service 18 years ago. Its reported passenger load was 224 people, which means its cabin was full or nearly full.
It had left the southern Sinai coastal resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh heading north for its destination, St Petersburg in Russia. Its route took it across Sinai – where the weather was good – and it would have continued northward over Cyprus and Turkey.
According to commercial flight tracking service Flightradar24 the aircraft was seen to suffer a disturbance which caused rapid variations in its speed and height, reducing the speed to 6okt at one point, which would put it into a deep stall condition unless the crew acted rapidly to recover speed again. Then the aircraft developed a high rate of descent – about 5,000ft per minute, and the position, height and speed information from the aircraft’s transponder was lost.
Flightradar24’s information about the Germanwings aircraft lost in the French Alps earlier this year proved to be highly accurate, and ahead of official information from the investigators it became evident that the A320 had begun what looked like a deliberate descent to impact, and so it subsequently proved.
In this case the information is more complex because of the apparent speed and height variations that preceded the fatal descent.
The Egyptian authorities have been quick to rule out terrorist action in the form of sabotage or a missile strike, but it is too soon to rule anything out. Sharm el-Sheikh is an important Egyptian tourist resort, and any suggestion of security breaches affecting travellers there would be harmful to trade.
The aircraft was cruising at 31,000ft, at which it would be safe from the kind of man-portable missiles that terrorists in the area could obtain fairly easily, but the aircraft was 2,000ft lower than the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that was shot down over eastern Ukraine last year by a more powerful ground-launched missile.
Early information suggests the aircraft came down in one piece and broke up on impact, making the missile strike theory less likely. On-board sabotage, however, does not have to break an aircraft up in order to damage its controllability.
So at this point it is certain that the aircraft suffered a serious upset during the cruise, but there is no indication why that occurred.
Learmount.com 
Another crash that has unusually taken place during the cruise phase. There’s still a general lack of photographs from the overall crash site and the information is sketchy, but it’s interesting to see the state of what appears to be the nose of the aircraft on this picture: http://avherald.com/img/metrojet_a321_ei-etj_sinai_151031_8.jpg
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Except now the BBC are saying (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34691763) that the search area has been “widened to 15k” and that “some bodies had been recovered within a radius of 5km on Saturday, and that of a three-year-old girl was found 8km from the scene”. Don’t you find it surprising that the beeb reporters don’t seem to grasp the implications of this – or of reports that the Russian authorities that may be responsible for the accident investigation reported that the accident was due to a technical fault before they had even examined the flight recorders?
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The reported wreckage scatter, as you imply, points to in-flight break-up. Modern airliners, including 18y-old ones, don’t just break up in the air. The Russians are not pointing to any specific cause at present, but one has to be careful of both Russian and Egyptian pronouncements. In both cases they have reasons for interpreting evidence according to an agenda, and Egypt in particular has form in this department where air accident investigation is concerned.
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