MH17 occupants maybe conscious for one minute during crash: Dutch Safety Board

Some of the victims of the MH17 disaster in eastern Ukraine might have been conscious for one to one and a half minutes for which the crash lasted, the Dutch Safety Board concluded in its investigation report published on Tuesday.

However, the Dutch Satety Board deemed it likely that the occupants were barely able to comprehend the situation in which they found themselves and that they were not able to perform conscious actions after the impact. No indications were found that point to conscious actions.

The impact of the missile fragments and the subsequent pressure wave caused the aircraft to break up, but this was only instantly fatal to the three occupants of the cockpit and not to the other 295 victims of the crash on July 17 last year, according to the Safety Board.

"Other occupants were almost immediately exposed to factors that had an extreme impact on the body and were not the same for everyone," the Safety Board stated in its report. "There was the deafening noise of the impact, abrupt deceleration and acceleration, decompression and the corresponding mist formation, the reduced oxygen level, extreme cold, powerful airflow, the airplane's rapid descent and objects flying around."

"As a result some occupants suffered serious injuries that probably caused their death," the report continued. "In others, the exposure led to reduced awareness or unconsciousness in a very short space of time. It was not possible to ascertain the time at which the occupants died. It was established that the impact on the ground was non-survivable."

The Dutch Safety Board presented its long-awaited findings of the investigation into the cause of the MH17 disaster during a presentation at Gilze-Rijen Air Base and subsequently made public their two reports. Enditem