KUALA LUMPUR, July 22 ― The Malaysia Airlines MH17 plane downed in Ukraine last week was likely torn apart by shrapnel from a powerful missile that exploded nearby rather than in a direct hit, an analyst with defence consultancy IHS Jane’s suggested.
The assessment by Reed Foster was made to the New York Times based on photographs of the holes and tears from pieces of the wreckage taken by the newspaper’s photographers at the crash site.
According to Foster’s assessment, the shrapnel marks on the MH17 wreckage were different from those he expected to see if an aircraft suffered an engine explosion, which he said could result in “longer, thinner, oblique tears across the aircraft skin”.
The analyst observed that puncture marks on the pieces of wreckage showed a foreign object had entered the aircraft from the outside, pointing out the shrapnel holes and blistered paint around those holes, which he said were consistent with a hit from a fragmenting warhead, like that of a surface-to-air missile.
“Most of the smaller holes look to be caused by a high-velocity projectile, as opposed to simple shearing or tearing caused by the forceful separation of the panel from the airframe,” he was quoted saying.
The New York Times report added, however, that it was impossible to tell from the photographs alone the exact model of missile used.
American officials believe the missile belonged to the SA-11 class of weapon, an old but powerful anti-aircraft system also known as Buk in Russian that was widely used in the 1970s Soviet era that could go up to 25,000 metres, far surpassing the 10,000-metre altitude at which Flight MH17 was flying when it was downed on July 17.
The missiles in the SA-11 system were designed to home in and explode below the targeted aircraft and send a shower of shrapnel into the airframe, the newspaper report said, citing Foster who compared the damage sustained as “more like a shotgun than a rifle”.
Such a design was to ensure that even if there was no direct hit, a shrapnel from the supersonic blast wave would be enough to take out the targeted aircraft’s engine or cut the fuel and hydraulic lines of even speedy and highly-manoeuvrable military jets, the report said.
The Boeing plane carrying 298 people on board ended was terminated mid-air over conflict-ridden Ukraine, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur.
There were no survivors.
