MOSCOW, September 9 (RIA Novosti) – A preliminary report on the July Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash over eastern Ukraine is due to be issued on Tuesday in the Hague.
“The Dutch Safety Board will issue the preliminary report on the investigation into the crash of MH17 on Tuesday 9 September 2014”, the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) announced last Thursday. “The preliminary report will present factual information based on the sources available to the Dutch Safety Board. In the months to come further investigation is needed before the final report can be written. The Dutch Safety Board expects to publish the final report within a year after the crash”.
“The initial report is always just a statement of facts that have been established. It is never an attempt to say what the cause was,” David Learmount, Operations and Safety Editor for Flight Global said in an interview with the Voice of Russia on Monday.
“In Russia accident investigations tended to be rather more open than Western organizations. In the end the purpose of this is to release facts that have been established not causes. They are abiding by the annex 13 of the international civil aviation organisation convention on how accident investigation should be carried out. The intention of the investigation is to find out what happened not who to blame. The purpose is to find out what happened so it does not happen again,” Learmount added.
In a July 21 briefing, representatives of the Russian military released some of the data gathered as part of the probe into the July 17 crash, stating that Russian monitoring systems detected up to four Ukrainian Buk M1 air defense systems in the vicinity of the crash on the day of the accident.
The DSB will most probably not release cockpit voice recordings of flight data recording, the report will contain factual information and will give a factual conclusion, Learmount said.
Davis Learmound has also expressed concerns over the political interests behind the discourse. “Everybody knows it was a long time before the first investigators were able to go to the site to begin. During that time there was lawlessness in the area surrounding and there was no active police force. Evidence was not protected,” he said.
Flight MH17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed on July 17 in the Donetsk region, killing all 298 people on board. The reason for the crash has been a matter of debate since then.
Kiev has been accusing local independence supporters in eastern Ukraine of shooting the plane down, yet the authorities cannot provide any conclusive evidence. The local militia leaders insist that they do not have weapons capable of shooting down a plane flying at 32,000 feet.
A preliminary report on the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine is expected to be issued on September 9 at 10:00 a.m. local time Amsterdam (8:00 GMT).
