Expert view: What it's like to be an air crash investigator
As MH17's black box is handed over, what does an air crash investigator do and see?
The MH17 crash scene should be examined by air crash investigators Photo: AP By Harry Wallop
5:00PM BST 22 Jul 2014
Follow The images from the MH17 crash site in Ukraine have been horrific for television viewers and newspaper readers to see, even when they have been heavily edited. But for air crash investigators, part of their job is to confront the sight of large wreckages, bodies and scattered personal possessions. David Gleave, a senior independent aviation safety investigator, explains that though investigators rarely have to deal with the corpses directly, it is hard to avoid distressing scenes at a crash. "You hope there is an agreement between the airline and a company called Kenyons, [JH Kenyon, the funeral directors]," he says. "You hope there is a contract between the insurance company and the airlines for Kenyons to do that for you. "It is quite common around the world for the funeral directors jump on an airplane and do what they need to do at this point. It saves us a huge amount of mental trauma." Related Articles
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One of the reasons that many air crash investigators do not need to rush to the site of a crash immediately is because they specialise in piecing together what has happened from the salvaged wreckage, which has been subsequently taken to a hangar. Also many have very particular jobs -- searching for the 'black box', for instance, analysing the cockpit voice recordings, some are explosive experts, whose job it is to take swabs from the wreckage, which will then be analysed in a laboratory. Gleave, who specializes in human error, air traffic accidents, airport crashes and weather-related incidents, says: "You hope in the time it takes you to get there, you hope some of this [removal of corpses] has already been done. That's not always the case. Having a foot drop out of the wreckage of an aeroplane onto your head -- as happened to me a couple of years ago -- is not particularly pleasant. "The smell is what usually gets to you, because you can't get away from it, even if the funeral directors have done their thing, and taken the decomposing bodies away. With this crash [MH17], there has been a large post-impact l fire -- we saw the pall of smoke -- you then have burnt bodies, which aren't pleasant to look at. Even when they are removed, the aircraft will still smell of that. I know that smell instantly. It is very distinctive." That smell, he says, can still persist after the wreckage has been taken to a hangar. "Luckily for me, I can be called quite late in the day and I get presented with what I call clean wreckage. That is just my job, I walk in do what I have to do. That doesn't affect me at all. "Other times, I can be deep in the wreckage and the burnt body smell is still there and then, yes, it is not always easy at the end of the day just to take your overalls off. You need to take a shower. "Once -- after a long day on a wreckage -- when the team went out in the evening for a meal, I had to ask one of the ladies if she had any perfume, which I sprayed under my nose so I couldn't smell my own clothes." Gleave says that picking his way through the site of an actual crash is not always the most traumatic aspect of the job. Sometimes, the work undertaken at a desk can affect you even more. "It depends on what your task is in the investigation. If your task is to decode the cockpit voice recorder and do the transcript of that and analyse it, you may end up listening to people dying time and time again. I've certainly gone into shock -- you know what is coming up and you shock out of it. You just don't hear anything for a while, because it is so traumatic. Then you need to calm down before you listen to it again and again. "Eventually, you sit there and chop up the recording into little clips and then you hear all the noises and you say, 'ah, yes, that's the seat rails moving backwards and forwards, that's a particular switch being activated, that's a push button click, that must be this that and another'. They all have a distinctive sounds. You either know it from experience or you go to a simulator and record the sounds to analyse them and compare them. "What is distressing is hearing people when you know they are going to have an accident, or when one of the crew know something bad is about to happen but the captain is not listening." Counselling, he says, is important. "You need support whether it be from counselling or family and friends. Occasionally you need to come home, curl up on the sofa and cry for a bit and try to get it out of the system. "But, I would say that what I have seen is less horrific -- over time -- than what those working in the fire brigade or those in the police dealing with motorway accidents see. "It can be horrific - 1 per cent of the time. Listening to people die is not a nice job. But it's not all death and destruction" Malaysia
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