Russian airline Kogalymavia, which operated the Airbus A321 that crashed in Egypt's Sinai peninsula on Saturday, has blamed the crash on a midair mechanical impact.

According to a senior manager of the company, the crash resulted from a major damage caused to the airplane's frame in flight.

Viktor Yung, deputy CEO of Kogalymavia, said that the airplane was not flying, but falling, TASS news agency quotes him as saying.

According to him, by that time the plane had suffered considerable damage that did not allow it to proceed with the flight.

Yung noted that the airplane fell apart while still in the air as a result of excessive G-force effects caused by free fall.

In his words, “no combination of failures in the plane's systems might have caused the plane to disintegrate in the air”.

He dismissed the possibility that decompression alone would have caused the crash.

The crash will be investigated jointly by Egyptian and Russian authorities, with all possible causes, including technical failure, to be examined.

The crew of the airplane made no attempts to contact air traffic controllers and did not report any emergencies on board, which means that it had completely lost working ability.

Andrey Averyanov, deputy general director of Kogalymavia, said there were no complaints of technical nature in the log book of the crew.

Averyanov added that the plane had taken off exactly on schedule, which means that the crew was not taking any actions or procedures different from the standard ones.

He dismissed the possibility that fatigue cracks had developed on the airplane, pointing that the last checks were performed in March 2014.

The airplane was conducting flight 9268 between the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh and Saint Petersburg when it crashed shortly after take-off in the Sinai peninsula on Saturday.

None of the 224 people on board, among whom were 217 passengers and 7 crew members, survived the crash.