The closed-circuit TV footage showed the plane going down in a steep angle and exploding.
Al-Ghaith said the plane attempted to land in line with established procedures.
“As far as we know the airport was open and we were good to operate,” he said, adding that they couldn’t have landed without air traffic controllers’ permission.
Al-Ghaith said the pilots hadn’t issued any distress call and hadn’t attempted to divert to an alternate airport.
“It was an uncontrollable fall,” said Sergei Kruglikov, a veteran Russian pilot, said on Russian state television. He said that a sudden change in wind speed and direction could have caused the wings to abruptly lose their lifting power.
Several planes had landed in Rostov-on-Don shortly before the Dubai airliner was scheduled to touch down, but other flights later were diverted.
Pilot Vitaly Sokolovsky told Rossiya 24 television that a sudden gust of wind could be particularly dangerous at low altitude while the pilot was throttling up the engines to make another run.
Viktor Gorbachev, director of the Russian airports association, said the airport in Rostov-on-Don has modern equipment to deal with adverse weather.
President Vladimir Putin offered his condolences to the victims’ families and top Russian Cabinet officials flew to the crash site to oversee the investigation.
Emirati authorities including the president, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, sent condolences to Putin, and Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who also serves as the Emirates’ vice president and prime minister, expressed his regrets on his official Twitter feed.
In a statement expressing “shock and grief,” Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades confirmed that the pilot was a Cypriot national, Aristos Socratous from Limassol.
Officials said the plane and bodies of the victims were torn into small pieces by the powerful blast, making identification difficult Investigators said they were working on the plane’s cockpit conversation recorder and another one recording parameters of the flight.
It was FlyDubai’s first crash since the budget carrier began operating in 2009. It was launched in 2008 by the government of Dubai, the Gulf commercial hub that is part of the seven-state United Arab Emirates federation. The carrier has been flying to Rostov-on-Don since 2013.
FlyDubai’s fleet consists of relatively young 737-800 aircraft, like the one that crashed. The airline says it operates more than 1,400 flights a week.
The airline has expanded rapidly in Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union. Dubai is a popular destination for Russian vacationers, and many Russian expatriates live and work in Dubai, a city where foreigners outnumber locals more than 4-to-1.
FlyDubai has a good safety record. In January 2015, one of its planes was struck on the fuselage by what appeared to small-arms fire shortly before it landed in Baghdad. That flight landed safely with no major injuries reported.
Article Appeared @http://time.com/4265182/dubai-airplane-crash-russia/