question here right now. an executive of the airline company said they hadn t been paid over the last two months. he blamed that on the state of the russian economy. we know it s suffering sanctions, european/u.s. sanctions for its actions in ukraine. authorities here in russia say they re investigating metrojet and also investigating what order its finances were in overall. we also know that they ve investigated the company s other two a321 aircraft, those have both been found to be in good condition and are back in the air, we re told. alisyn? nic, thanks so much for that new reporting. over to chris. we have the issue of whether or not this was about maintenance or something worse. let s bring in cnn terrorism analyst and editor in chief of ctc sentinel as well as a former pilot and aviation consultant.
point finger back at metrojet, maintenance, what happened there, that would send the ball back to russia. is there political advantage here to be played by russia or is this just about embarrassment for russia? it depends what the facts are going to show from the russian point of view, i think, chris. we do know you have a lot of different entities on the ground. that s the good news. you have the black boxes. they re not dispositive but they do give you information. thank you both. more drama in the aviation world. 100 passengers forced to evacuate after a plane crash lands in lahore, pakistan. this plane slid off a runway into a grassy field. the landing gear collapsed. sources tell a cnn affiliate the plane s tire appears to have
was that nobody was allowed access to the site because of the fighting and because of the lack of control over this situation. so so much information that could have been garnered early on wasn t. you re saying here, you will definitely know why this happened and if people want to, they would know sooner rather than later, yes? well, it s highly unlikely that they re not going to know what happened. when you have an accident report, it usually says probability of what happened. it s not always that there is an absolutely conclusive decision as to what caused an accident. but i think here we will find out. i have no doubt about that. we have the french and german investigators involved, too. you know, most of the concerned parties have a conflict of interest. we ve heard that from the chairman of metrojet. we ve already heard it from the president of russia. however, between the four
federal aviation investigation here now because of late payments over the past two months. an executive from metrojet had said that the payments were late because of the poor state of the economy of the country, an indication of the u.s. and european sanctions on russia because of its actions inside ukraine. but nevertheless, the federal aviation authority is looking into all the monetary aspects, the economic viability of this company at the moment to see if that could be a contributing factor. they ve also looked at the airline s other two aircraft. those have passed inspection and are back in service. and today, the harrowing process of identifying bodies, 196 have been returned to far of which 9 have been identified, two of those children, both girls, one age 10 and one age 14. chris? what has to drive the
structural member being lost or a bomb on board. let s talk about what we do know about this particular plane s structural integrity. this metrojet, the tail of this very plane struck a runway somehow in cairo in 2001. what would the connection between that incident and this crash, what could it possibly be? it would be the nature of the repair and how good the repair was. tail strikes happen several times a year in the united states alone. i d probably say on estimate maybe every other month we have a major plane with a tail strike. it depends on how it s repaired. now if this plane had great service and great inspections and we would know that the repair was good and held, but, for example, in the crash of japan airlines 123 in 1985, there, a tail strike repair did not hold, it blew out. it caused a rapid decompression and the plane was uncontrollable. however, the difference between that one and this one, in that case, the airplane was able to