A full transcript of the last few moments of communications on the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 before it crashed has been released by the Dutch Safety Board. All 289 passengers and crew were killed when the flight, which was travelling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down by Russian missiles as it passed over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.
Now, transcripts of communications between the cockpit and an air traffic controller in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, have been released and reveal the last words communicated by the air crew. They were: “Romeo November delta, Malaysian one seven”. Flight control staff attempted to contact the plane a number of times after that but got no response, as transcripts show the frantic search to locate the doomed flight.
Among those killed were 196 Dutch citizens, 38 Australians, 10 Brits, as well as Belgians and Malaysians. The recent report confirmed that the plane “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”.
Contact was lost at 1.20pm on the day of the crash. The air traffic worker then called the next control centre due to contact the flight in Rostov, Russia but they were also unable to get in touch with the flight crew. Then, crew members from another aircraft that was flying close by were asked if they could see the plane, to which they responded that they couldn’t.
The transcripts reveal the panicked moment when the Ukrainian air traffic control worker told staff in Russia that the flight had “disappeared”. The Russian air traffic controller responded: “Nothing, we see nothing.”
On Monday, the UN’s Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) voted that the Russian Federation failed to uphold its obligations under international air law, which requires states to “refrain from resorting to the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight”.
Air traffic control callers attempted to contact the flight crew until 1.35pm, but the plane had already crashed.
The council also said that allegations by Australia and the Netherlands were “well founded in fact and in law.” Meanwhile, Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp said that the ruling was “an important step towards establishing the truth and achieving justice and accountability for all victims of Flight MH17.”
A full report by the Dutch Safety Board is expected by next July.