By Jon Ostrower and Andy Pasztor
International air-accident investigators have yet to reach the
farmland crash sites in eastern Ukraine to analyze the scattered
remains of a Boeing Co. 777 or the jet's black boxes, more than
three days after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by what
U.S. and Ukrainian officials have said was a surface-to-air
missile.
While evidence mounts that the plane was shot down by a
sophisticated antiaircraft weapon, both forensic evidence at the
scene and the data- and cockpit-recording devices, known as black
boxes, remain crucial to understanding how the jet came apart and
crashed. Debris could point to clues about where any missile
hit.
The black boxes could also definitively rule out any equipment
malfunction on the jet itself. They could also provide some
indication of the unlikely chance that the pilots saw a launch or
knew a missile was approaching.
The jet's twin data recorders are now embroiled in the region's
volatile politics. Ukrainian government officials said on Sunday
that they had intercepted conversations suggesting separatists were
under pressure from Moscow to find the black boxes and keep them
out of the hands of international investigators.
Video taken at the scene appears to shows one uniformed recovery
worker carrying a day-glo-orange box, purported to be one of the
flight-data or cockpit-voice recorders.
On Sunday, the separatist leader of the self-proclaimed Donetsk
People's Republic, Alexander Borodai, said the black boxes had been
located and were being stored in Donetsk. He said he was ready to
hand them over to international aviation experts.
"We are not tech experts; none of us have seen a black box. We
suspect that the artifacts we've recovered are the black boxes," he
said.
Officials from the air-safety arm of the United Nations are
proposing to take possession of the black boxes, said people
familiar with the details.
A team of investigators from the International Civil Aviation
Organization arrived in Kiev on Sunday night, these people said,
and immediately began discussions to be designated as the impartial
organization that will safeguard the flight-data and cockpit-voice
recorders, or black boxes. No final agreement has been reached,
they said, as ICAO works with other international groups and
Ukrainian officials to develop a strategy.
Early Monday in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin put his
weight behind such a deal.
"It's essential for a robust team of experts to work on the site
of the crash under the auspices of ICAO, the relevant international
commission, " he said on the Kremlin website posted early
Monday.
Another person familiar with the details said Kiev reached out
to ICAO on Thursday for help, and it agreed to assemble a team to
tackle the issue of gaining control of the black boxes. The team
includes representatives of the U.S. Federal Aviation
Administration, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and
the U.K.'s Aircraft Accidents Investigation Branch, this person
said.
On top of Ukraine's request for help, the U.N. Security Council,
which meets on Tuesday, could formally call for ICAO to take a
direct leadership role in the probe. The ICAO delegation, said
several people close to the developments, is led by Marcus Costa,
the agency's chief accident investigator.
After securing the black boxes, the team of experts working
under ICAO's purview are expected to coordinate efforts to secure
the wreckage. In addition, said one person familiar with the plan,
the team's broader responsibilities are slated to extend to
overseeing retrieval of information from the black boxes; analyzing
radar data and satellite imagery; and setting up further teams of
structural experts and other investigators to look for and analyze
missile fragments.
Once air-crash investigators are provided unfettered access to
the crash site, even a preliminary examination of debris can yield
important clues about what likely brought down a plane. The type of
damage detected on the surface of the metal skin, and where pieces
of the wreckage ended up in relation to each other, are the major
elements of such an analysis.
"It's relatively easy to see evidence of the punch inward from a
missile strike versus the outward burst caused by some explosion
inside the plane," said Bill Waldock, a structures expert who
teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
Images of debris from the scene, Mr. Waldock said, indicate that
the tail section of the aircraft, including the horizontal
stabilizer, most likely separated from the fuselage while the
Boeing 777 was still airborne. Much of the rest of the
plane--including the wings, main landing gear, significant parts of
one or both engines and the center section of the fuselage where
the wings are attached--appears to have ended up in close
proximity.
"Whatever happened blew the tail off first, while the rest of
the aircraft remained more or less intact" until it hit the ground,
Mr. Waldock said.
The debris field also can provide clues about the type of
missile and even the direction from which it came, according to
air-safety investigators. An SA-11 missile, such as the one U.S.
and Ukrainian officials believe was fired at the Boeing 777, can
operate off a proximity fuse that would make the warhead explode
before striking its target.
The impact from shrapnel is designed to sever an aircraft's
fuselage, immediately destroying essential systems and making it
impossible to fly.
When international investigators examined a U.S. missile strike
that brought down an Iranian passenger jet over the Persian Gulf in
1988, they were able to document precisely such a sequence of
events.
By examining the wreckage and other data, investigators
determined the angle of the missile strike, said Caj Frostell,
former chief accident investigator for the International Civil
Aviation Organization. Mr. Frostell worked on the 1988
investigation.
Despite the widespread presumption that a missile strike brought
down Flight 17, careful analysis of the debris is still necessary
for investigators to conclusively document how the plane came
apart.
"Some people would say at this point, that there is not much
doubt about what happened," Mr. Frostell said. But debris analysis
is necessary as part of the definitive answer, he said.
However, clues into what exactly brought down MH17 could be
increasingly difficult to identify. Malaysia's transport minister,
Liow Tiong Lai, said the country is "very concerned the sanctity of
the crash site has been severely compromised."
Data downloaded from the plane's black boxes, if they end up in
the possession of investigators, could buttress explanations of
where the plane was hit and what sections fractured first.
Such data would show a cascading series of equipment failures
aboard the plane, air-safety experts said, even as it was likely
spiraling out of control and plummeting toward the ground, over a
period spanning minutes, from 33,000 feet where the jet had been
cruising.
Alexander Kolyandr and Richard C. Paddock contributed to this
article.
Write to Jon Ostrower at jon.ostrower@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor
at andy.pasztor@wsj.com
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