Romanian military expert, pilot and former deputy commander of Otopeni military airport, Valentin Vasilescu, commented on the report about the investigation of the reasons of the Boeing-777 crash in Ukraine.
1. “The available images show that the pieces of wreckage were pierced in numerous places. The pattern of damage to the aircraft fuselage and the cockpit is consistent with that which may be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated he aircraft from outside”.
Vasilescu: A I said in an interview for Pravda.Ru: “MiG-29 of the Ukrainian army are armed with GSh-301, 30-millimeter gun, with a rate of 1,500 rounds per minute. The gun was loaded with 150 shells containing tungsten alloy. These shells go through targets, leaving traces of perfectly circular shape. They do not explode inside the cockpit, they are not incendiary, but can kill the crew and destroy the cockpit, which can be seen in the presence of holes with their edges opening outside on the opposite wall”. In tape cartridges for the gun GSh-301, 30-millimeter gun inserts also a few explosive-incendiary shells, which explodes inside the cockpit, producing fragments with high velocities that get out of the fuselage of aircraft in the cockpit area, like shrapnels produced by detonation of the warhead of a surface-to-air missile. The gun shots were fired by an experienced fighter pilot, who targeted only the cockpit. This is demonstrated by the fact that the section of fuselage aft of the cockpit remained intact. There were no holes that could have been caused by shrapnels.
Also read: Boeing-777 was shot down by Ukrainian MiG-29
2. “Boeing 777-200 broke up in the air probably as the result of structural damage caused by a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside… Aircraft engine parameters were consistent with normal operation during the flight”.
Vasilescu: “The Malaysian Boeing MH-17 was shot down from a gun of a MiG-29 aircraft, rather than a missile. In this case air-to-air missiles are equipped with heat seekers that target the most heated part of the aircraft, i.e. the engines. The crashed Boeing had the cockpit destroyed”. There was no damage of the engines of the Boeing till the wings (where engines are located) before the plane hit the ground. There was no thick plume or white condensation at an altitude of ten kilometers from the surface, which should have been left from the launch of an air-to-air missile.
3. “It’s likely that this damage resulted in a loss of structural integrity of the aircraft, leading to an in-flight break up”.
Vasilescu: “The death of the crew and the depressurization of the cockpit made the Boeing spin instantly, and the plane fell apart at an altitude of two thousand meters. The plane, as shown by black boxes, collapsed in the air, but this is only possible in case of a horizontal nosedive from the height of ten thousand feet, when the maximum speed limit is exceeded. If the plane spins, the crew is very often unable to control the aircraft. Instantaneous depressurization of the cockpit may also occur”.
4. “The cockpit voice recorder, the flight data recorder and data from air traffic control all suggest that flight MH17 proceeded as normal until 13:20:03 (UTC), after which it ended abruptly… A full listening of communications among the crew members in the cockpit recorded on the cockpit voice recorder revealed no signs of any technical faults or an emergency situation.”
Vasilescu: “If such a large aircraft like Boeing-777 of Malaysia Airlines had been hit by surface-to-air missile, the crew would have been able to warn traffic control services of the situation on board. But we do not see anything like that in registers.” In addition, the MH-17 was flying on heading118°. Fighter airplane MiG-29 was approaching to fire its guns in the perpendicular direction to flight MH-17 (118 + 90 = 208). This corresponds to the direction of the sun at 16:21 local time. Nobody in the media has touched upon one basic thing related to Boeing 777. Flight controls of the pilot are transmitted to the cabin with electric circuits being like fly-by-wire. The crew cannot control the airplane, in case of destruction of the transmission elements which commands the rudder and the stabiliser, both placed in the tail of the aircraft. Short circuit in the electrical system in the cockpit, as a result of gun fire, disabled the transponder and the radio station.
At the press conference of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation of July 21, 2014, Chief of General Staff and Chief of the Air Force, Lieutenant General Andrey Kartopolov and Igor Makushev proved the existence of a Ukrainian aircraft that would have stopped the fight of Malaysia Airlines, three minutes before the accident, estimating the distance that separated him from Malaysia Airlines to 3-5 km.
But the Doc. 4444 (Air-Procedures Rules for Air Navigation Services) issued by the International Organization of Civil Aviation, Article 7.4.4 indicates that the minimum distance allowed between two aircraft is based on their turbulence. The Boeing 777 (weight 299,370 kg) belongs to the category of aircraft heavy (H – Heavy). Between this category of airplanes and fighter jet like MiG-29 (weight 10-20 t), Doc. 4444 requires air traffic controllers should create a gap of at least 9.3 km. Was it a mistake or a deliberate action of air traffic controllers of Ukraine and the Ukraine fighter aircraft 3 km far from flight MH-17? When the Boeing 777 was shot down, it was at 30 miles from Tamak navigation point, in the process of transferring flight control from the control region of Dnepropetrovsk (which is responsible for the airspace in eastern Ukraine) to the control region of Rostov-on-Don (the beginning of Russian airspace).
The same Document 4444, Chapter 7.5 (transfer of radar control) obliges agencies of Ukrainian civil and military air control traffic (ACT) to a minimum distance that allows the separation of radar between the flight MH-17 and Ukrainian fighter jet, enough to ensure the safety transfer of the civilian aircraft to the Russian ACT. According Document 4444, the normal separation for category H aircraft, followed by fighter jet is at least 11.1 km (fig. VI-VI-1A and 1B).
The Ukrainians shot down the plane, when the Boeing was being delivered by the Ukrainian ACT to the Russians ATC.
Thanks to the evidence presented clearly, civil and military Ukraine authorities were perhaps cooperating to shoot down Flight MH-17 from a Ukraine fighter aircraft. Why does the ICAO and Eurocontrol hide this flagrant violation of the rules of navigation? Before the pilot of the fighter jet could aim and open fire on the cockpit section of the B-777, which is a section six meters long, from the total length of 64.8 m, the B-777 was supposed to enter whole into the fighter pilot’s line sight. The sighting device automatically makes calculations giving the pilot all necessary parameters for projectiles that hit the fuselage of flight MH-17. The best way to hit the cockpit was to approach almost perpendicular to the direction of flight MH-17. In this caseб the pilot of the fighter jet had the right conditions to get ready to fire from the distance of 900 m at B -777. If the approach speed of the Ukrainian jet fighter was about 280-300 meters per second, the repetition of the attack was impossible, and the Ukraine fighter pilot had 3-4 seconds for all these maneuvers. This could be a result of dozens of hours of training in simulators and flight conditions similar to those when flight MH-17 was shot down.
