[Peetwo]

Short intermission.

Looks like congratulations time for P2.  The hard work and effort he has put into MH 370 research has been incredible, the ATSB thread here has just become the first Aunty Pru thread to reach over 10,000 views.  When you add up all the MH 370 data, it shows a cart load of good work.

Well done P2 – hat full of Choc frogs, gold star and we will suspend the watch on the biscuit tin for a day – enjoy.   Bravo – that man… …

Aw shucks... ..what can I say but here's to the next 10k...100k or ???

Anyway back to business & some more food for thought from Ben..

Calls for MH17 guilt tribunal raise tricky issues

Ben Sandilands | Jun 28, 2015 12:04PM |


After a harsh northern winter, more remains were recovered from MH17 impact zones

The limitations the UN body ICAO sets on air crash investigations would support fresh calls for a separate tribunal to identify and if possible pursue those responsible for the mid air destruction of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine on 17 July 2014.
But such a renewed call (first made very early in the crash aftermath) faces hurdles irrespective of the positions (plural) taken by Russia which has been widely identified as the source of a ground launched missile believed to have destroyed the jet and killed the 298 people on board the Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur flight and implicated in the alleged launching of the missile by Russia supported separatists in the eastern area of the central Asia republic. 

This report by The Guardian on the revived possibility of such a tribunal includes a significant change in the original Russian position of opposing what it had previously characterised as anti-Russia bogey man hunts.

Deputy foreign minister Gennady Gatilov in his detailed quotation says “Now we must wait until the end of the investigation rather than adopt hasty resolutions on creating a tribunal …the issue is very sensitive and serious and must be thoroughly studied”.

This is not only sensible and correct in the light of ICAO Annex 13, which defines the purpose and scope of air crash investigations by parties to the UN treaties on civil aviation,  but coming from a senior person in the Russian government, is markedly different from the somewhat shrill earlier rhetoric blaming the incident variously on a Ukraine jet’s machine guns or in a revised version, an air-to-air missile it was then supposed to have fired at the Malaysia Airlines 777-200ER.

To recap, Annex 13 investigations are required to seek answers to the causes of air disasters and draw and circulate among the aviation community world wide, the safety lessons and recommendations that would improve air safety and general and prevent accidents with specific identified causes from happening again.

They are specifically excluded from determining guilt.  However in real life, guilt is sometimes uncovered in air crash investigations, and such identification of guilt is  intended in practice to be handed over to the processes of criminal prosecution that may apply usually in the jurisdiction of the country which had registered the airliner involved or been the location of the disaster or both.

The Germanwings pilot suicide and mass murder disaster in France in March was turned over to French criminal authorities within a day of the cockpit voice recorder providing prima facie evidence that the first officer intentionally flew that jet into the base of a mountain in the Alpes Maritimes, killing himself and the other 149 people on board.

Something similar happened just as quickly in Australia in January 1977 when the pilot of a Connellan Airways Baron flew it at full speed into the airline’s headquarters at Alice Springs airport, killing himself and four other people who were in the building.

The stitching up of the pilot of the Pel-Air corporate jet that was ditched near Norfolk Island in 2009 as being to blame by a discredited and disgraceful investigation by the ATSB is a clear case of the Australian investigator disregarding its obligations to Annex 13 and making this country look both derelict and unjust in relation to crash inquiries.

Australia has no lofty or high moral ground to stand upon when it comes to air crash investigations. We look crude and nasty given everything that has come to light about the conduct of the ATSB and CASA’s own failures in relation to its oversight of Pel-Air.

The initial investigation into the crash of MH17 released on 9 September last year found that it was probably destroyed “by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.”

The inquiry has subsequently recovered and initiated the analysis of this shrapnel, but said nothing publicly about thus identifying it with hostile machine gun fire or the detonation of a Russiain made BUK missile in the near proximity of the forward section of the jet.

If the strict interpretation of Annex 13 was followed, the Dutch led crash investigation would hand over the result of such shrapnel analysis to a criminal authority, the question then being which such authority, for which a purpose built but independent UN tribunal or body is clearly the answer being envisaged for that question.

The machine gun scenario has been abandoned by Russia, perhaps because it is inconsistent with the finding in the initial report that all of the functionality of MH17 as a flying aircraft was destroyed in an instant that came about so quickly that there isn’t even a syllable of alarm on the cockpit voice recorder.

However the identity of the party that launched what is suspected to have been a Russian made BUK missile  appears to be illusive.  The possibility that an air-to-air missile launch was responsible for the disaster hasn’t been comprehensively dismissed, however if it was an air launched kill the terrible possibility that a civil airliner was deliberately targeted becomes much stronger, because it is pretty damned hard to  mistake a large airliner for anything else in the sky.

It is important also to note that Russia and the Ukraine both co-operated fully with the initial and, it is assumed, on-going investigation.  There is a wide divide between the rhetoric from Moscow, and even Canberra and Washington DC, and the methodical and determined inquiries of the official ICAO Annex 13 compliant  investigation.

The setting up of a special tribunal to identify and pursue those responsible for MH17 will set up an important precedent for a similar inquiry in relation to missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.  Of course trying to work out what happened to MH370 has not progressed anywhere nearly as far as it has with MH17.

There isn’t any wreckage to analyse, no flight data or voice recorders to analyse, no potentially clue yielding personal effects , in fact nothing except some difficult to analyse communications data and some extraordinary admissions of early misleading commentary from the government of Malaysia which may have seriously compromised the search for the truth.

At some stage, such a commission of international inquiry into the causes of the MH370 disaster may also become an imperative. Whether there is the courage, or guts, in Australia or elsewhere, to take on the Malaysia authorities over the alarming indications of deliberately misleading behavior at an official level, and for what reason, is something for a future day.

 
Much..much more to follow..P2