MH17 crash: UK investigators at Farnborough to examine downed plane's black boxes
The Dutch government has asked for the UK’s assistance in examining the "black box" flight recorders retrieved from the Malaysia Airlines flight shot down over eastern Ukraine last week.
Latest news is that they are in good condition and they haven't been tampered with. Whether they yield anything which might help with the investigation is another matter but, all avenues have to be explored. Whatever the result the impartiality of the analysis is at least assured.
Fascinating, but what's to be learned that isn't already evident? I doubt we'll find any surprises to speak of -
"At such and such time, there was a series of abrubt engine/airframe vibrations (violent vector changes / g accelerations) a nearly simultaneous sudden cabin decompression, loss of normal and essential electrical power, flight controls and instrumentation disruptions followed by vertical and lateral accelerations consistent with loss of primary flight control and the compromise of structural integrity of major airframe components, followed by a departure from stable flight path and loss of altitude as stability and thrust were in decay, followed by... end of signal."
Normally we wouldn't speculate like that of course, but in "operational terms", we're not talking about an "accident" here so I've applied license.
Think: we're looking at a flagrant combat event -
- At best we'll get a snapshot of the order of business of the death of an airplane and its occupants as it was assassinated by a missile;
- At worst, the tape will roll on and tell us more about the suffering that may have been endured by anyone unlucky enough to have survived the initial attack long enough to be aware of any portion of the fatal ride to the ground.
How much do you want to know?
What will we glean from it? "How to make transport airplanes systems and structures more resistent to enemy missile attack"?
I think not. I hope we will learn to better apply what Ric said so well above - avoid combat zones. And we have to face that a combat zone, these days, can be quite portable - so we have to learn to guard against that too. Maybe we'll see some form of missile avoidance applied commonly to transports in the future, I don't know. But it is ridiculous to believe that we'll ever 'harden' a transport to withstand a direct missile attack, no matter what we learn of how this bird failed from such an event.