Malaysia T7 down!!

[EconomyClass]

Fun fact: Putin served in the KGB from 1975 to 1991. That was the period in which the KAL007 was shot down. You might say Putin was conditioned that civilian casualties are not adverse to the interests of his state. I remember when people wondered what Andropov would do as leader of the USSR, coming from the KGB. Now maybe we're starting to get the answer as the new Russian state is led by another KGB operative "elected" in a democracy (the Communist Party always got elected too, remember?)

[Jpmkam]

CVR data successfully downloaded.

LONDON—The first of two black boxes from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was successfully downloaded Wednesday with work on the other device due to take place Thursday, the Dutch Air Safety Board said.

The two devices that store data from the aircraft and record conversations in the cockpit arrived Wednesday in the U.K. for analysis by the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch at Farnborough, England. The AAIB is gathering data for the Dutch-led probe into the crash of the Boeing 777 on July 17 that killed all 298 people onboard.

"The Cockpit Voice Recorder data was successfully downloaded and contained valid data from the flight," the Dutch agency said in a statement. The device was damaged, though the critical memory module was intact with no evidence it was tampered with, it said. (Follow the latest updates on the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine.)

"The downloaded data have to be further analyzed and investigated," the group said.

Work on the flight data recorder will take place Thursday. If that information can be extracted the data from both recorders will be combined to gain a fuller understanding of what happened in the shoot-down of the plane while cruising at 33,000 feet above eastern Ukraine.

Analyzing the data isn't expected to help officials determine who shot down the jetliner, though it could rule out any technical failure leading to the accident.

The Dutch Safety Board said earlier Wednesday it could take several weeks to fully complete the data analysis.

Air accident investigators have failed to inspect debris at the crash site because of uncertainty about the security situation there.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/data-from-two-mh17-black-boxes-successfully-downloaded-1406133890

[EconomyClass]

Could they really find anything in an "analysis" that would change the narrative? I think lawyers and their clients are probably just ignoring this phase as busy work.

[elaw]

It certainly seems unlikely. My guess is it'll be [boring cockpit banter][sound of explosion][end of recording].

I'm sure there are people hoping to hear one pilot say "Look, an approaching SAM" and the other say "Yes, it looks like it was fired from that area below that's occupied by Russian-backed separatists"... but I'm not holding my breath for that.

[brianw999]

I rather fear that the last 60 seconds of the CVR will be enough to make the strongest willed man cry.

[Observer]

Radar data

Elaw, with that, could we say that radar data may be more important than CVR?
Does anyone know if civil radar is able to determine where the missile was shoot from?

[elaw]

I rather fear that the last 60 seconds of the CVR will be enough to make the strongest willed man cry.

I'm not so sure about that!

From the wreckage photos, I suspect pretty much the entire plane was very quickly disassembled in midair (at FL330 and x-hundred knots, no less). In that case I'd imagine both the power and audio wiring to the CVR would be severed, yielding either no recording or silence.

[elaw]

Elaw, with that, could we say that radar data may be more important than CVR?
Does anyone know if civil radar is able to determine where the missile was shoot from?

I'm hardly an expert but I'm going to guess civil radar data will have limited usefulness.

First, I think the radar antennas only make a sweep maybe once every 15 seconds. A missile traveling at Mach 4 can cover quite a distance in 15 seconds, so there will only be a limited number of data points showing the missile's path.

And second, civil ATC radars as far as I know don't measure altitude - they rely on the airplanes' transponders for that information. So while they might track the missile in latitude-longitude (or range and bearing if you want to get picky), without altitude info you can't really recreate a 3-dimensional picture of the missile's path.

When I first started thinking about this I thought the missile's size might be a factor too - they're not very large. But having looked at photos they look bigger than, say, a single-engine Cessna. So presumably they would reflect enough radar energy to show up.

[Jpmkam]

Elaw, with that, could we say that radar data may be more important than CVR?
Does anyone know if civil radar is able to determine where the missile was shoot from?

The intelligence satellites are more likely to have a better idea of the launch point.

[Jpmkam]

I rather fear that the last 60 seconds of the CVR will be enough to make the strongest willed man cry.

That is something I fear as well.

[Gabriel]

I rather fear that the last 60 seconds of the CVR will be enough to make the strongest willed man cry.

I don't think so. The transponder (and I think ACARS too) stopped transmitting with the plane smoothly flying straight and level at cruise altitude.

That means that the transponder stopped transmitting at the moment of the explosion, and likely the CVR and FDR stopped recording at that moment too.

[Gabriel]

Elaw, with that, could we say that radar data may be more important than CVR?
Does anyone know if civil radar is able to determine where the missile was shoot from?

A big missile like this one likely reflected measurable "blips" on the radar and they are likely recorded. It will be a 2D trace though, since I very much doubt that the missile had a transponder, especially not one transmitting altitude information.

[brianw999]

I'm not so sure about that!

From the wreckage photos, I suspect pretty much the entire plane was very quickly disassembled in midair (at FL330 and x-hundred knots, no less). In that case I'd imagine both the power and audio wiring to the CVR would be severed, yielding either no recording or silence.

I'm surprised that no one seems to have linked to this video unless I missed it. It reputedly shows MH17 coming down in flames but essentially in one piece with the right engine/wing on fire. I use the word REPUTEDLY as we've already had someone claiming on Facebook that the Bagram B747 freighter crash was MH17. The video is poor here but it certainly looks like a large twin engined civilian aircraft and the colour scheme looks about right from this view angle. The initial black screen changes at 17 seconds.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F-D6OtFrz_8

[mfeldt]

That's not MH17.

The sky wasn't blue and the plane ist not a T7.

[LX-A343]

Yep, that's never a T7.