"It is obvious that the equipment did not work as intended. The experts are yet to establish, what it was caused with, and a special technical commission has been created to this end," he said, according to RIA Novosti.
Read alsoWing flap fault main theory behind Black Sea Russian jet crashThe minister added that preliminary data of the probe would be available in January 2017, while final conclusions into the cause of the Tu-154 plane crash will be made after the decoding of all flight recorders.
As UNIAN reported earlier, the Russian Defense Ministry said the plane disappeared from radar screens on December 25, at 05:40 Moscow time, shortly after taking off from Sochi.
There were 92 people onboard the plane, including 83 passengers. Among them were military servicemen, musicians of the famed army choir, the Alexandrov Ensemble who flew to entertain the air group of Russia's Aerospace Forces at the Hmeymim airbase in Syria in the run-up to the New Year, and nine representatives of Russian mass media covering the trip.
