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Barack Obama

Jet crash investigators need to scrutinize wreckage

Bart Jansen
USA TODAY
A rescue worker uses sticks to mark the location where bodies of victims have been found at the site of the crash of a Malaysian airliner carrying 298 people  in eastern Ukraine on July 18.

As looters reportedly removed pieces of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, crash experts said investigators need to get to the scene quickly and examine parts of the jet to determine what happened.

The Boeing 777-200ER was shot down by a missile Thursday with 298 people aboard, according to U.S. officials. Confirming a missile strike and how it damaged the jet will take detailed scrutiny.

"Being able to examine everything as it landed is important – not after everybody has picked through it as they are obviously doing," said William Waldock, a former accident investigator who teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona. "Every piece of evidence has meaning."

By international agreement, Ukraine should be in charge of the investigation because of where the jet went down. But the area is held by Pro-Russia separatists, who may have fired the missile.

President Obama and other government leaders called for an international investigation, but it's not clear whether that will happen. Two members of the FBI, which investigates crimes, and one investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board, which probes crashes, headed to Ukraine, but it's not clear if they will get to the site.

"The $64,000 question is whether we get access," said Daniel Rose, a lawyer who worked on cases involving Pan Am 103 and TWA 800 disasters for the Kreindler & Kreindler firm in New York.

Among the wreckage, an engine is visible in the main crater. So is at least one compressor wheel with blades bent distinctively.

Because large pieces of the tail came down miles from the bulk of the jet, Waldock said, the missile apparently knocked the tail off, sending the jet uncontrollably almost straight into the ground.

"The fact that the fire was as intense as it was and the fireball was as large as it was would suggest how the missile affected the airplane," Waldock said. "Most likely, it hit the tail, and the airplane from that point on is unflyable."

The jet carried cockpit-voice and data recorders that could describe what was happening before the crash. Their value may be limited if everything was fine until the catastrophe, then they went silent.

"All you're going to see in the black box is everything is hunky dory until it isn't," Rose said. "The wreckage itself is likely going to be the most critical evidence."

Subtle clues are possible, though.

Waldock said the recordings can show whether an explosion happened inside or outside a plane's pressure hull. The sound was different between Pan Am 103, which blew up from a luggage bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, and TWA 800, whose fuel tank ignited near Long Island.

"An explosion that happens inside the pressure hull leaves a very distinctive sound signature," Waldock said. "That was one of the ways you can sort out what you're really dealing with."

The jet's hull could reveal whether an explosion pushed the skin outward from the inside or inward from outside the jet. The Russian-made SA-11 missile suspected in the incident would have blown up near the jet rather than strike the aircraft.

"It's like a giant shotgun shell," Waldock said.

Another facet is the intelligence that revealed a missile in the first place. Soviet involvement in the shooting down of Korean Air Lines 007 in 1983, which carried a member of Congress as a passenger, was confirmed only after secret U.S. intelligence information was disclosed, Rose said.

"The Russians denied everything until confronted with the eavesdropping information that we had," Rose said.

Looting at the crash site is a concern. Rose said he worked on a case in a foreign country involving a smaller plane where the entire propeller was missing – until a sum of money was left on a tree stump.

"I had had cases in much more friendly countries involving much less high-profile planes where locals think nothing of picking up the propeller on the plane and holding it," Rose said.

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