By Robert Wall and Andy Pasztor
Air accident investigators probing the downing of Malaysia
Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine said high-energy objects
struck the Boeing 777 and caused the plane to break apart
midflight
"The initial results of the investigation point towards an
external cause of the MH17 crash," said Tjibbe Joustra, chairman of
the Dutch Safety Board, which released an interim report on the
crash Tuesday.
The report is the first official publication on the cause of the
incident. The Dutch group is leading the probe that also involves
representatives from the U.S., U.K. and International Civil
Aviation Organization.
There is no evidence of a technical fault, the report said. The
plane's pilots issued no distress call, according to investigators,
and their last communication with air-traffic controls, involving
routine acknowledgment of a route change, occurred about seven
seconds before the onboard recorders stopped working.
The Boeing 777 was brought down on July 17 while flying at
33,000 feet from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur killing all 298 people
onboard. The U.S. and Ukraine accuse Russian separatist rebels of
shooting down the plane with a sophisticated antiaircraft missile.
Russia denies its allies were involved.
The incident escalated western efforts to impose sanctions on
Russia for its involvement in Ukraine. Russia has imposed
retaliatory sanctions and said it may bar western airlines for
using its airspace on heavily trafficked flights to Asia.
Accident investigators have said they would not seek to
establish culpability. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak on
Saturday said intelligence reports on the downing of the plane are
"pretty conclusive."
The Dutch-led group said the jetliner was "pierced in numerous"
places. "The pattern of damage to the aircraft fuselage and the
cockpit is consistent with that which may be expected from a large
number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from
outside," the board said. The findings are consistent with a
missile strike. A missile warhead creates shrapnel to destroy its
target.
The objects that struck the plane are likely to have led to a
loss of structural integrity of the Boeing 777 and an in-flight
break up, the board said. "This also explains the abrupt end to the
data registration on the recorders, the simultaneous loss of
contact with air traffic control and the aircraft's disappearance
from radar," it said in the report.
The final report is due to be published within a year of the
accident, the board said, adding it expected more evidence to
become available.
An interim report is typically issued a month after a plane
crashes, but the Flight 17 report was delayed because investigators
were unable to reach the crash site amid fighting between Ukrainian
government troops and the pro-Russian separatists. Ukraine has said
Russian troops also are involved in the fighting, a charge Moscow
denies.
The crash report draws on information gleaned from the so called
black boxes, which record conversations in the cockpit and store
data on the aircraft's systems. Britain's Air Accident
Investigations Branch extracted the information from the units that
were damaged in the crash but still contained useful
information.
There were no indications of aural alerts on the cockpit voice
recorder, the board said, and the flight data recorder also didn't
indicate anything was wrong with the plane.
The safety experts, who were recalled from Ukraine last month
amid problems reaching the crash site, also have been examining
video and photographic material for clues. Most of the analysis has
been conducted in The Hague.
Accident investigators said the final report would also explore
why Flight 17 was cleared to fly through airspace where days
earlier a military transport plane flying at lower altitude was
shot down. Ukraine had imposed a limited flight ban in the wake of
the downing of the military plane, though the Malaysia Airlines jet
traveled at an altitude declared safe and in airspace used by other
carriers.
The downing of Flight 17 has heightened concerns among airlines
about where they fly. Most airlines have stopped operating over
Syria and Iraq amid worries that clashes on the ground could
threaten flights.
Write to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com and Andy Pasztor at
andy.pasztor@wsj.com
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