Re: Malaysian Airlines MH17 crashed in Ukraine
Reply #77 –
You do know, of course, that the data recorders might not tell you a lot at that. Commercial airliners don't have a lot in the way of defensive capabilities, so it's entirely possible that the flight crew had no knowledge of the missile until the plane was riddled with shrapnel and was falling from the sky. Up until the end you would hear standard conversation if anything with the plane on autopilot at 33,000 ft, the crew mainly monitoring the situation. The flight data recorder might record only standard stuff right to the point where debris hit the control surfaces and caused the sudden, violent last movements. Neither would prove, definitively, who fired the missile.
If you're expecting either the voice recorder or the flight data recorder to say, for sure, that either the Ukrainians or the Russian-backed Separatists were responsible-- you're probably gonna have a bad time.