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Malaysia Airlines flight struck by ‘multiple objects’
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MALAYSIA Airlines flight MH17 was likely struck by multiple “high-energy objects from outside the aircraft,” causing it to break up over eastern Ukraine, a preliminary report into the deadly aviation disaster concluded yesterday.
The report by the Dutch Safety Board stopped short of saying the Boeing 777 was shot down by a missile but its findings point to that conclusion. It also did not say who might have been responsible.
The Boeing 777 suddenly plunged out of the sky on July 17 over territory held by pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew on board.
“The damage observed in the forward section of the aircraft appears to indicate that the aircraft was penetrated by a large number of high-energy objects from outside the aircraft,” the report said. “It is likely that this damage resulted in a loss of structural integrity of the aircraft, leading to an in-flight break-up.”
The board is leading the international investigation into the cause of the disaster. A full report is expected within a year.
“The initial results of the investigation point toward an external cause of the MH17 crash,” the board’s chairman, Tjibbe Joustra, said in a statement. “More research will be necessary to determine the cause with greater precision. The safety board believes that additional evidence will become available for investigation in the period ahead.”
Christopher Yates, an aviation safety specialist at Yates Consulting, said the report was “consistent with damage from a missile for the simple reason there are penetration marks.”
He added: “It must have been moving at very high velocity to create the damage. It could only be a missile of the type that would reach the altitude that would have struck the aircraft.”
He said the report gave no indication whether the missile had been fired from the ground or from another aircraft, but it likely came from the ground as there were no military aircraft known to be flying at the time.
The missile could not have been shoulder-fired because it would not have reached the necessary altitude, Yates added.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak welcomed the report, saying that its key conclusion “leads to the strong suspicion that a surface-to-air missile brought MH17 down, but further investigative work is needed before we can be certain.”
Because of fighting between the Russian-backed rebels and Ukrainian forces, investigators from the board have not yet visited the fields in eastern Ukraine where the wreckage fell. That likely contributed to the board’s cautious assessment.
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