russian commentary
 

Nothing much interesting said.
Complained about hot climate, looting of valuables, and passengers phone found. Also egyptian military and authorities to be cooperative.

ISIS phone convresation "intercept" combined with "Cameron refused to give intelligence info to Putin" in last phone conversation brings some throughts (about intercept of course)

Well, what is the source for this piece of information, I wonder... When I googled it earlier, the oldest hit I got was that daily mail article, which didn't mention as much as an anonymous source, as far as I could see.

No need to be so snide about the UK - it does actually contribute something into the intelligence relationship from time to time! In this particular case I suspect that its listening post on Cyprus may have had something to do with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayios_Nikolaos_Station

i first heard about it from RT.com updates at 13:35 GMT 05/11/15

so it seems to have come a fairly direct source rather than a Egyptian 'close to the investigation'. No mention of distance was given but as she was only found yesterday it struck me she was in an extended search area so some distance from the main crash site.

Meanwhile at the airport and according to the Telegraph (and now the BBC as well)
The Egyptians are being awkward about letting the rescue planes leave and have cancelled them.

The DT also reports now that the CVR also just stops - and gives a link to a russian language news source.
Russian plane crash: Chaos as rescue flights are cancelled by Egyptian authorities leaving British tourists stranded - latest news - Telegraph

Metrojet a/c grey paint
 

@triumph61

Please note Metrojet paints the bottom of the a/c fuselage dark grey, what you interpret as burn and heating marks may just be part of the livery. Life of an Airbus A321 - Album on Imgur

http://i.imgur.com/LSUS2Xu.jpg

Thanks, WNTT. At that time the area searched would have been 33 or 40 square kilometers, if I'm reading the TASS right. Probably not a square, but if it was, that's about 6 by 6 kilometers.

real armchair detectives
 

Eternal NYC writes:

So you think we are wasting time here, and we should jump to "obvious" conclusions?
Do you remember how "obvious" it was for TWA800 that it was hit by rocket?
Instead it was much less exciting explosion in empty fuel tank.

Here we enjoy putting together a puzzle from scarce facts. The last piece in the puzzle would be event that caused catastrophe. Not the first.
We try to understand how known facts can be put together without contradictions, eliminating theories how and when things happened.

So far we know:
Initial event severed cables to FDR and probably to CVR.
However ADS-B remained functional for about 26 seconds after flight became unstable. Initial event might have happened much before flight became unstable. (toddler position) There was a lot of yawing and unstable descent, after flight became unstable. Loss of tail fin? Horizontal speed was quickly lost at the end of these 26 seconds. During that time plane travelled about 5km. There was a headwind about 27m/s.
There was a fire inside that scorched rear fuselage seats and occupants according to autopsies.

It could be, that initial event happened before flight became unstable. toddler location hints that it happened some 1 minute 30 seconds before flight became unstable. But we have little facts. We need to know when exactly FDR stopped and put that time on known flight path. We need to know what parts were found around toddler.

All UK inbound flights to SSH being prevented according to BBC

Easyjet Egypt rescue flights 'halted' - BBC News

One does wonder about the "common" sense of some adults
 

The decision by the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands to abruptly suspend flight to/from SSH cannot have been based just on 'chatter' evidence - there must have been something more specific, more substantial.

And now it appears that Egyptian authorities are preventing the arrival/departure of easyJet planes not already at SSH.

EasyJet says Egyptian authorities suspend some British flights | Reuters

The BBC news just now reports easyJet saying all British airlines are being prevented from using SSH by the Egyptian authorities.

Is this some sort of Egyptian retaliation - preventing UK holiday makers from leaving?

I saw that and thought the same Cazalet33 - This is stupidity at any airport but to allow it at SSH in the current climate beggars belief.

Long time lurker, occasional SLF, and someone who knows a bit about electronics here, Prada, commenting to Kulverstukas noted:

I think this is not quite true. Modern flight recorders use solid state memory to store data, and the memory chips and associated gubbins will operate from a power supply of 5V or 3.3V. The supply to the recorders from the plane will be either 28VDC or 115AC, so there is a power conversion unit within the recorder. Once the power input stops, there will be a brief period of time during which the recorder electronics will continue to operate, as there are capacitors in the power supply that store charge. It's unlikely to be several seconds, more likely a second or two tops. It may even be necessary for the device to clean up the end of the recording, the equivalent to closing a file on a computer, a process that is initiated by the failure of the power supply.

The other interesting thing is, as I understand it, that the data to the recorder arrives over a bus, upon which many data values are multiplexed. Thus if the bus is severed, all data values from the bus are lost.

This all means that when examining the recording in this supply and/or data lost scenario, there are a number of possibilities.

If the power fails and the data is still available, then data will be recorded right to the bitter end of the recording. The recorder may even record that it has lost power. Or, if the power is on and the data fails, then that failure should be on the recording with nothing after. Or if both power and data fail simultaneously, then to the recorder that is the same as the first scenario, the recorder is still working for a short time, but there is no data input to record.

Thus even though there is no data that is helpful in understanding the flight parameters at the time of the incident, there is a little bit of info as to how the recorder became separated from its data and power, from which it may be possible to make a judgement call as to how the flight recorders separated from the rest of the plane.

There is an assumption here that the recorder remains physically intact through the above failure modes; if the memory container becomes separated from the electronics container then of course recording just stops.

Position of toddler
 

Re the position of the toddler and "defying the laws of momentum" (post #1300), how about the following scenario: HS breaks loose (for whatever reason), nose bunts down, tail and part of rear fuselage shears off. Now the rear of the fuselage is open and it is spinning about its transverse axis. Could the rotation rates be such that a free object (such as an infant) could be catapulted upwards (at the initiation of the event) or downwards (after half a revolution) PLUS a rearward component that would effectively null the forward momentum of the aircraft? In that case there is nothing strange with an object falling straight down.

However, Mr. Occam is frowning at me right now...

And as a father it breaks my heart at the image of a parent seeing his/her toddler disappear into the void. Luckily, they would not have suffered long... RIP.

In today's paper (6 Nov Daily Telegraph) it says that subsequent to the crash intelligence services re-examined the increased chatter post-crash and determined that there was a significant risk.

It then said that this information was not passed directly to all concerned but shared initial with the US and later parts were shared with German and French agencies. The point being to protect systems and sources.

That Russia was not informed should be no surprise. Suggestions that the UK knew in advance is also probably wrong.

Russia suspends Boeing 737 certification
 

Retaliation for the US/UK "it could be a bomb" campaign?

Russia suspends Boeing 737 certification

Well... I don't doubt chatter played a major part... esp. chatter 'before' the incident that was uncharacteristic.
Then we have the crashed aircraft... the place; the Russian connection; the increasing evidence that little else than an explosion or bomb brought it down... c'mon. Things add up and ISIS sympathiser chatter likely played a major part in decision making.

Not likely. Russia says it's "own" 737 (Ireland and Bermuda registered) can still fly.

Kid with gun
 

Assuming the picture is from Sharm and is not some photoshopped image to further drive-up people's blood pressure ...
"Common sense", as per the heading of that post, is of course a disappearing commodity within the human DNA. Many parents these days are not even 'parenting' anymore, clear evidence of the non-existence of common sense amongst many (most) in modern day society.
Can you imagine a kid from an Arab country faffing around with a toy gun at a British airport - ad the reaction? The disrespect this kid and his parents are showing as guests in a foreign country is beyond words.