By Daniel Michaels and Andy Pasztor
Crash investigators preparing to pore over the debris of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine face a daunting task
gathering and analyzing evidence that lies in a battle zone and
could be tainted.
Nearly a week after the Boeing 777 went down, pieces of the
plane offering information about its last seconds may have been
moved, damaged or stolen, from what one veteran investigator
considers the most disrupted crash site in recent memory.
The treacherous scene isn't unique for such air-crash sleuths,
who over the years have confronted natural and human obstacles
ranging from wild animals to land mines and looters. Teams have
delved into wreckage from planes that slammed into inaccessible
mountain ridges or plunged into deep water.
Typically, speed is essential to preserve evidence. But in
Ukraine, where armed gunmen roam the site without any government
controls, concerns about physical dangers remain abnormally
high.
"At every crash site, investigator safety has to be absolutely
paramount, " said John Cox, a safety expert and former U.S. airline
pilot who now runs a consulting firm in Washington. Supervisors
"need to monitor the situation extremely carefully" and be ready to
pull teams out as soon as it changes, he said, since the "current
window of cooperation is likely to be limited in duration."
Debris from the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, on which all 298
passengers and crew died, is scattered across 35 square kilometers
(13.5 square miles) of fields and villages in territory controlled
by Ukrainian separatist rebels, who initially barred investigators
from the site.
"You've always had to be wary of where you're going to
investigate an accident because of the elements, topography or
local people," said Richard B. Stone, a past president of the
International Society of Air Safety Investigators.
Still, Mr. Stone said, the crash site in Ukraine has been more
disturbed than that of any other major accident in recent
decades.
"I can't think of as disrupted a site," he said.
Commercial flying over the past two decades has grown
increasingly safe in developed countries and more common in
less-developed regions, where a culture of safety is less
ingrained. As a result, a rising proportion of accidents is
occurring in hard-to-reach parts of Africa, Asia and Latin
America.
Conflicts have limited investigators' access to crash sites in
the past. In 2003, a Boeing 737 operated by Kam Air of Afghanistan
slammed into a hilltop on its approach to Kabul. The snow-covered
peak was dotted with land mines and home to wild animals, including
hungry mountain wolves, according to Robert Benzon, a U.S. National
Transportation Safety Board investigator who participated in the
work.
Because of the security concerns, investigators managed to stay
for only about 30 hours at the site, Mr. Benzon said in an article
about the investigation in ISASI Forum, the air-safety society's
magazine. Helicopters carrying them "always flew with both doors
open and with heavy automatic weapons at the ready," Mr. Benzon
said. "This was not a normal investigation."
Natural barriers pose a more common obstacle to accident probes.
A Kenya Airways Boeing 737 that disappeared in May 2007 after
takeoff from Douala, Cameroon, bound for Nairobi was found 36 hours
later in a mangrove swamp. Removing plane parts and human remains
from the dense, steamy jungle was particularly difficult, according
to reports at the time.
A similar challenge faced investigators probing the crash of a
Valujet McDonnell Douglas MD-80 that plunged into the Florida
Everglades in 1996. Investigators braved temperatures above 38
degrees Celsius, or about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as
alligators, snakes, mosquitoes and biting flies, to reach the
wreckage on air boats. For protection against chemicals and disease
from rotting corpses, workers had to don double-layer plastic
protective suits with rubber gloves duct-taped on, said Stephen
Kilmon, president of surveying firm ViaLink Inc., which helped the
NTSB find the plane.
"You would fill up each boot with sweat in 20 minutes," recalled
Mr. Kilmon. "I didn't know you could sweat that much."
A year earlier, an American Airlines Boeing 757 clipped a
mountain approaching the airport in Cali, Colombia, killing 159
people. The scene, almost 9,000 feet up, was looted before a full
team of investigators arrived, because difficult terrain delayed
them.
Midair airplane explosions, which scatter wreckage over a large
area, are comparatively rare. One precedent for Malaysia Airlines
Flight 17's large debris field is Pan Am Flight 103, which was
blown up by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The
town, however, was a picture-book image of orderliness. Local
residents were traumatized by the destruction rained upon them, but
they left the wreckage largely untouched.
Planes that strike water can also leave remnants far below the
surface and at the mercy of currents, further complicating a
search. To collect parts of Swissair Flight 111, which crashed in
the Atlantic Ocean off Nova Scotia in 1998, investigators dangled a
submersible pipe from a specialized ship to vacuum the seabed. Over
months, pieces of the decimated McDonnell-Douglas MD-11 were
painstakingly picked out from huge volumes of collected rocks and
sand.
Similar challenges dogged investigations of TWA Flight 800,
which exploded off Long Island, N.Y., in 1996, and Air France
Flight 447, which crashed en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in
2009.
Politics has also occasionally posed obstacles, as it has in
Ukraine. When Polish President Lech Kaczynski's Tupolev 154 crashed
on approach to a military airstrip in Smolensk, Russia, in 2010,
the two countries spent months fighting over the investigation.
Because it was a diplomatic flight on a military plane, rather than
a commercial aircraft, United Nations rules on access to the crash
site didn't apply.
And not all hostile environments are in remote locations, since
crash sites are inherently stressful for participants. Mr. Stone
was one of the first investigators on the scene after an Air
Florida Boeing 737 crashed into the ice-covered Potomac River in
Washington in 1982. He showed his credentials, but to no avail.
"A policeman told me to get away or he'd shoot me," Mr. Stone
recalled. "I understood--he was under tension."
Write to Daniel Michaels at daniel.michaels@wsj.com and Andy
Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com
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