Team of experts gets down to work at MH17 site
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3-man delegation 'quite happy' with access; find heat melted the wings
While the fighting between rebels and the Ukrainian army continues in the distance, the Malaysian three-man team of aviation experts has buckled down to its task at the MH17 crash site.
The team members are “quite happy” with the access they were given to the site yesterday, spokesman for the Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, Michael Bociurkiw, said.
Accompanied by 15 Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors and a security detail provided by the rebel Donetsk People’s Republic, he said they also felt protected while conducting inspections in an area that was much burnt and charred.
Bociurkiw told reporters that they made several findings yesterday.
“The Malaysian experts observed that the heat from the impact was so intense it actually melted the wings,” he said.
He explained that this was because the wings of the 17-year-old Boeing 777-200 were of aluminium as opposed to the composite material more commonly found in newer planes.
The experts who arrived on Tuesday, comprised Malaysia Airlines director of engineering Azahari Dahlan and Department of Civil Aviation senior assistant directors Captain Philip Joseph Selvaraju and Mohd Naemy Fahimy Mustapa.
Bociurkiw said the OSCE also noticed that emergency recovery personnel were absent from the site and that tents set up in the area for this purpose had been packed away.
The Ukrainian monitors had left the area after their last search on Monday.
Perimeter was not secured
Many personal belongings of the dead passengers, Bociurkiw said, had been removed, noting that the crash site perimeter had not been secured.
“There is still the existence of smaller body parts on site,” he said, adding that they had yet to be collected.
He said the search area was a challenging environment, with sunflower and other fields, villages and nearby conflict zones.
When asked if there had been any recovery of parts of a purported missile that might have struck MH17, Bociurkiw said Ukrainian officials who were there previously had apparently found the answers they sought.
“They gave us the sense that they were quite pleased with what they found. They will take those findings back to Kiev,” he said.
When pressed on the matter, Bociurkiw said the OSCE had not found anything that might have indicated a missile strike at this point.
