Shrapnel tore apart cockpit of MH17

THE cockpit of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was torn apart by a mass of objects as it flew over eastern Ukraine.

THE cockpit of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was torn apart by a mass of objects travelling at high speed as it flew over eastern Ukraine.

The first report on the air­liner’s destruction avoids any mention of Russian missiles, but what it describes is consistent with a massive explosion just ahead of the aircraft and a deadly blast of shrapnel.

The cockpit voice-recorder stops abruptly and with no indication that the crew had time to say or do anything. They made no emergency call.

With the cockpit shattered, the aircraft’s fuselage broke up at well over 30,000 feet, with the wreckage falling over an area 10km long and 5km wide, killing all 298 people on board, including 27 Australian citizens.

The preliminary investigation report by the International Civil Aviation Organisation was released in The Netherlands last night and finds that the destruction of Flight MH17 was not caused by aircraft malfunction or pilot error.

Everything was operating normally until the explosion came.

The report also makes no comment on where the missile might have originated.

Photographs of pieces of the cockpit and front of the aircraft showed multiple holes and indentations that indicated they had been punctured by high-energy objects.

Angela Turnbull, whose Sunshine Coast-based daughter and son-in-law — Theresa and Wayne Baker — were among those killed, said she had not ­received a copy of the report.

“We haven’t had the TV on or anything else, so we haven’t seen the report,” Ms Turnbull said.

Tony Abbott and Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss said the findings were consistent with the government’s statement that MH17 was shot down by a large surface-to-air missile.

They said the report drew on data from the aircraft’s black-box flight recorder and cockpit voice recorder, satellite imagery and photos from the crash site. Its findings are based on an objective analysis of available evidence.

The Prime Minister said the report did not attribute blame or liability for the incident.

“This is the role of the multi­national criminal investigation led by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service, which is currently under way.”

The report confirms that the plane was asked to increase its altitude to 35,000 feet because another Boeing 777 was approaching from behind at the same level.

Three commercial aircraft were in the same area with the closest about 30km away.

However, the crew were unable to comply and requested to stay at 33,000 feet. Twenty minutes before the crash, they asked to divert 20 nautical miles off their track because of weather.

A transcript of air-traffic control communication showed the last transmission from the plane was an acknowledgment of an air-traffic controller’s instruction. Just over two minutes later, a controller observed that the aircraft’s target “started falling apart’’.

Mr Abbott and Mr Truss said in a statement that the international community must remain focused on finding, prosecuting and punishing the perpetrators of “this cowardly attack”.

“We owe this to the innocent victims of the MH17 downing and their families,” the statement said.