MOSCOW, September 10 (RIA Novosti) - A preliminary report released by the Dutch Safety Council stated that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was hit by numerous external objects, but there was no evidence of technical shortcomings or crew error and additional investigation was required to better understand the causes of the crash and find those responsible for the tragedy.
We asked international aviation and safety experts to comment on the situation.
Joseph Schwieterman, a transportation professor at DePaul University in Chicago, USA told Radio VR that the “world will feel better if there was a true international team that had a fresh look at the matter.”
“The Dutch report, strong as it is worded, is still not based on a kind of forensic engineering analysis that we would want for an accident of this magnitude,” he said.
Douglas M. Moss, an airline pilot with more than 30,000 hours in the air and president of AeroPacific Consulting, suggested that information which is essential for understanding what happened could be held back, as it is hard to find a balance between the country’s national security and the obvious need and desire to enhance safety and to conduct a proper investigation.
“Obviously all the countries realize there is a value of having a thorough investigation but yet the country needs to protect its own intelligence assets,” he said.
“There could also be political implications,” he therefore suggested. “Politics are in every [single] thing that happened in the world, especially in that part of the country. There are obviously tensions in Ukraine in between the various powers at play. There will always be political ramifications and arm twisting,” he said.
Captain John Cox, the chief executive officer of Safety Operating Systems in Washington DC and a world-renowned aviation expert, was truly surprised that no information exists on the last words of the pilots.
“If they saw an explosion near them, I would have expected them to say something like ‘What’s that?’ ‘Did you see that?’ – anything that would indicate some concern,” he said. “We‘ve seen that in other accidents where there have been catastrophic problems and the crew would have made comments just before the tragedy, but in this case it does not appear to be true.”
General Jean Du Verdier, a retired French Air Force commander and military analyst at the Permanent Council of Aviation, commented on the inability of the report to specify who fired at the plane.
“If we analyze the situation as a kinematic diagram, it appears that for the plane to have crashed near the city of Torez, given its speed of flight, and according to my calculations, the shot that brought it down would have to have occurred well within Ukrainian territory, if it was a shot that brought it down,” he said.
“If a plane begins falling apart in flight, the larger its fragments, the further the pieces will fly. Therefore, the trajectory of the fall is rather simple to calculate, if you know the initial speed and height at which it was flying when it was destroyed. It seems to me that experts will be able to determine exactly where the plane was blown up.”
“I can make such a calculation myself, but in any case the point where the plane was shot down could not have been near Torez; it was much further to the west. Although this in itself does not prove that the missile, if it was a missile, was necessarily launched in the west. “
Flight MH17 was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it crashed in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. The reason for the crash has become a matter of debate since then.
