Dubai: Investigators are still trying to determine the cause behind the fatal flydubai crash in Russia eight days ago, the United Arab Emirates’ General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA) said on Sunday.

Flydubai flight 981 crashed and exploded in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don on March 19 after a second attempt to land at the city’s airport. All 62 passengers and crew died in the crash.

“Before the data is fully examined, it would be premature to hypothesise the cause of the accident,” GCAA director-general Saif Mohammad Al Suwaidi said in an emailed statement.

Russian television channel Rossiya-1 reported on Friday it had obtained a transcript of the conversations between the flydubai pilots moments before the crash, AFP reported on Saturday.

“Don’t worry,” the pilot reportedly says repeatedly in the transcript translated into Russian, before repeating seconds later “Don’t do that!” The last words are repeated calls to “Pull up!”

Questions have been raised over why the pilots chose to land in what has been reported to be bad weather conditions when other airlines flying to the airport diverted. Flydubai has said the two pilots were very experienced with a combined flying time in excess of 11,000 hours.

The Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) has been translated into Russian and also English, the GCAA said. But Al Suwaidi urged against speculating out of “respect for the feelings of the relatives of the victims and the integrity of the investigation”.

Esmail Al Hosani, assistant GCAA director-general of the air accident investigation sector, said analysing the voice recording is a “detailed and time-consuming” process.

The quality of the downloaded voice recordings, which investigators have been analysing for the past five days, is “satisfactory”, the GCAA said.

A team from the GCAA is in Russia assisting the investigation that also includes Boeing, the United States’ National Transport Safety Bureau (NTSB) and European experts. Boeing has completed computer simulations that agree with the flight data, GCAA said. The findings of those simulations have not been released.

The investigation team has also successfully downloaded information from the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). The GCAA said the quality was “satisfactory”.

- With inputs from AFP