FARNBOROUGH, ENGLAND, 18 July (RIA Novosti), Mark Hirst – It is too early to draw any definitive conclusions over what caused aircrash of Malaysian flight MH17 in Eastern Ukraine, a former air accident investigator told RIA Novosti.
“It is too early to make any definitive conclusions on what caused the crash of this aircraft. There is a lot of apparent evidences, pointing towards a fairly sophisticated ground-to-air-missile. But as with any disaster like this, it’s requires some very close study to finish up with definitive conclusions,” said Tony Cable, who has been an investigator with the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch for 32 years and worked on the Lockerbie/Pan Am 103 bombing and the Paris Concorde disaster.
According to Tony Cable, the kind of missile system allegedly used to bring down the flight would have to be very sophisticated.
“The previous cases I know of where aircraft have been shot down are mostly a result of air-to-air rather than ground-to-air missiles,” Cable said. “It would need to be a fairly sophisticated ground-to-air missile. There are a lot of Manpads [shoulder launched surface-to-air missiles] around the world and you can pretty easily get hold of them, but they tend to have a height limit of 10,000 feet.”
“Manpads don’t have a very good guidance system and there is no way one of them could get to 33,000 feet [the height MH17 was flying when it came down],” Cable added. “So if it is a missile that has brought down this flight it will be something considerably more sophisticated.”
Cable also told RIA Novosti he was surprised commercial flights were being permitted to fly directly over the conflict zone and said the responsibility for that had to rest with the Governments.
“I was surprised that aircraft were being allowed to fly over that area,” Cable said. “As far as I can see the responsibility for that would be government to government. So the Malaysian equivalent of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office giving advice to airlines. I don’t think you can expect the airlines themselves to work out that sort of detail on all the territories they cover.”
Cable worked directly on the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and despite the largest criminal investigation ever conducted in the UK and subsequent conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset al Megrahi, speculation still continues to this day over who was actually behind the attack. Cable told RIA Novosti a similar scenario could be repeated with Flight MH17.
“I could see a possibility of debate continuing over the causes of this disaster going on for years, as it has done with Lockerbie,” Cable said. “That is very much in the security and political field and way outside pure accident investigation which can just say what happened. It’s up to other folks to figure out why it happened.”
Cable added that it was important that an international investigations team witnessed the examination of the flight recorders and the read-outs contained within it.
“In most circumstances it would be essential that the flight recorders, the so-called Black Boxes, remain near the location of the disaster until international investigators were able to retrieve them,” Cable told RIA Novosti. “But we are dealing with a part of the world that is probably going to be looking after its own interests.”
A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed near the town of Torez in the Donetsk Region on Thursday, causing death of all 283 passengers and 15 crew members on board.
Kiev blamed independence supporters in the turbulent Donetsk Region for downing the passenger plane with a surface-to-air missile. Militia forces said they had no missile systems that could hit a target flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters.
Commenting on the tragedy on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for an objective and careful investigation of the tragedy.
