A Russian charter plane crashed over the weekend on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.  All 224 aboard the Airbus jetliner were killed, with company executives ruling out technical or human error only to be upbraided by aviation officials who called such assertions premature.

The Metrojet flight full of mostly Russian vacationers, bound for St. Petersburg from the Egyptian resort of Sharm el Sheikh, plummeted after reaching cruising altitude, scattering in chunks and bits across Sinai. The lack of information has combined with unsubstantiated claims by the Islamic State that its militants destroyed the aircraft to avenge Russia’s immersion into the Syria war.   The plane had been in the air about twenty minutes when it suddenly plummeted from around 33,000 feet above the Peninsula.

I’ve reviewed the data and in my opinion, this was foul play.  I say this for two reasons:

(1)  Scattered debris.  The parts of the jetliner were scattered over an area of five square miles, meaning that it broke apart high in the air.

(2)  The flight data.

As the chart above notes, the aircraft rose in altitude and then drops off.  My guess is that event occurred around 4:12 and the aircraft continued to fly, or at least the section containing the flight data black box continued to fly, upward.  This happened with the Lockerbie explosion as well.

This is inconsistent with ordinary mechanical error or pilot error.

The only question I have, in my non-expert analysis, is whether the plane was impacted from something one the outside, or exploded from the inside.  Piecing together the jetliner will be relatively easy and it will be easy to detect residue, if any, of chemicals or explosive powder.  Sadly, one way to figure out what happened is to examine the bodies for shrapnel from the plane.  If a person has something lodged in him/her from, say, the right side of the plane, and that person was sitting on the left, that would indicate that the fuselage exploded in — i.e., a missile.

Or maybe I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.  But I read about this stuff.

Anyway, with Russia taking an active role in the Middle East now, it clearly has skin in the game.  Maybe the United States would be smart to let Middle East turmoil become Russia’s problem.