SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Officials in Azerbaijan say they have opened an investigation into Wednesday's crash of an airliner in Kazakhstan. Russia's state aviation authority said the plane had left Azerbaijan's capital. And they say in mid flight, the plane hit a flock of birds and tried to make an emergency landing in Kazakhstan, hundreds of miles away from its destination in Russia's Chechnya region. The crash killed dozens of passengers, although at least 29 survived. Captain John Cox is a retired airline pilot. He now leads an aviation consulting firm and joins me now. Good morning.
JOHN COX: Good morning.
MCCAMMON: So, Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan all say they are investigating this crash. Just to sort of set the table here, what happens first at the sight of a crash like this?
COX: The first thing is the organization as to who's going to lead the investigation, and that they're going to conduct the investigation in accordance with the worldwide standards through the International Civil Aviation Organization. The experts then show up. They're divided into groups. And then the groups that will be in the field will go look at the wreckage. Others will look at operations, the maintenance on the aircraft. So there's a number of groups with specialists on each of these groups that actually conduct the legwork of the investigation.
MCCAMMON: Now, crashes involving multiple governments are already complex. This plane crashed in Kazakhstan near the border with Russia, which is on high alert because of Moscow's war against Ukraine. Now, we should say this was not near Ukraine. But how does an investigation proceed differently, perhaps in wartime?
COX: The - certainly you don't want the investigators themselves to be put at risk. That's the first thing. And then secondly, when you have a wreckage, as we do in this case, that has indications that it was near an explosion, and there are appearances of puncture wounds in the fuselage and tail similar to what we saw with Malaysia Flight 17 that was shot down by the Russians, those things make the investigators begin to look in greater depth for the possibility that this was actually shot down.
MCCAMMON: Of course, there have been those reports. NPR cannot independently confirm those reports. But what do you make of those pock marks you mentioned, reminiscent of an explosion that might have occurred outside the aircraft rather than inside. What does that say to you?
COX: It says that the aircraft was highly likely in the close proximity of an explosion, and that explosion included shrapnel. There's a mounting body of evidence to support that. The fact that the oxygen masks inside the aircraft were deployed, that says that the airplane was depressurized at some point. The flight path was a bit erratic, which says that the crew was fighting for control of the airplane and had limited control, which would be similar to what we saw with the United Airlines flight many years ago in Sioux City, Iowa. And then the actual pictures of the puncture wounds, which are similar to Malaysia Flight 17. All of those point to the possibility that there was an explosion potentially of an antiaircraft missile near the aircraft.
MCCAMMON: Now, as we said earlier, Russia blames a bird strike, a flock of birds. Do you see any evidence that that could be possible?
COX: The evidence so far is inconsistent with a bird strike. One, you don't hear the crew say that. Two, a bird strike doesn't cause the kind of damage that we're seeing on this aircraft. Fortunately, both of the recorders - the cockpit voice recorder and the digital flight data recorder - have been recovered. And so we'll get a look at actually what happened in pretty short order - probably a week or so, we'll know. But this is not consistent with a bird strike.
MCCAMMON: We'll have a better sense within a week of what might have triggered this. I mean, when do you think - in terms of the bigger picture, how this all played out, when do you think there will be a definitive answer?
COX: It'll take a year to 18 months to get a final report, and I'm hopeful they can do it that quickly. I think, though, because there's so much interest in this, that there will be - once the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder are read, I think we'll have a better idea of what happened. And I think that information will probably be made public.
MCCAMMON: That's aviation consultant John Cox. Thank you so much for your time this morning.
COX: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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