Investigators suggested earlier that bad weather could have been the primary cause, but now they say that if the crash wasn't caused by a mechanical failure, it may have been caused by the pilot not handling the weather conditions properly.
"Two theories of the plane crash are being explored... The first one is pilot error in acting in difficult meteorological conditions, and the second is mechanical failure," said Oksana Kovrizhnaya, a spokeswoman for the Investigative Committee's Southern Transport Investigative Department.
Kovrizhnaya also said that wind speed at the time of the crash was reaching 18 meters per second -- roughly 40 miles per hour, which could have caused the pilot error.
"Winds in and of themselves should not bring an airplane down. So perhaps it was a contributing factor," ABC News aviation consultant Col. Stephen Ganyard said.
"I think something else went wrong," Ganyard said. "Perhaps pilot disorientation. Perhaps this pilot was looking out the window trying to find the airport at night. And when you have night, and you've lost horizon, it's not hard to get visually disoriented and lose track of which way is up.
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