VOA标准英语2014--航空专家说导弹能显示发射信息

（单词翻译）

Airline Expert: Missile will Show Signature on Debris¹ 航空专家说导弹能显示发射信息

The debris field from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is spread over a 21-kilometer radius² in eastern Ukraine.  It is expected to take investigators⁴ months to sort through the airplane pieces to learn about the missile that brought down the jetliner and who fired it.

Soon, a multi-national force set up by the United Nations will guard the ground where the Malaysian airliner⁵ crashed after being hit by a missile over Ukraine.

The debris field was unsecured for days after the crash.  One investigator³ says he saw local workers cutting away the wreckage⁶ with a chainsaw.  

Experts worry that some pieces have been repositioned or removed, leaving the scene compromised.

Jim Wildey retired⁷ from the National Transportation Safety Board after 37 years.  His job was to determine if explosives caused a plane crash.

His team investigated the deadly crash of TWA Flight 800, which went down shortly after takeoff from New York.  Authorities initially⁸ suspected it was caused by a bomb, but the NTSB ruled that out.

Wildey says missiles will leave a signature burn on the wreckage.

“If a missile explodes nearby, you’d expect a shotgun blast of holes with concurrent⁹ damage associated with over pressure of the missile exploding.  If it’s further away, it might not be so obvious," said Wildey.

Wildey says this investigation¹⁰ is unlike any other because of the circumstances - a passenger plane shot down over a conflict zone in eastern Ukraine.  

Many are asking why some - like Malaysia Airlines - continued flying in the airspace, while others thought it was too dangerous.

Kenneth Quinn is with the Flight Safety Foundation.  He says in the past, governments avoided setting up no-fly zones over civil conflicts.  Local fighters typically did not have access to surface-to-air missiles that could reach cruising altitudes of passenger planes.  U.S. intelligence analysts¹¹ say a Russian SA-11 "Buk" missile downed the Malaysian-bound aircraft.

“This is a new threat, a new kind of capability¹² that heretofore had only been possessed¹³ by some of the large powers - principally Russia and the United States and the Mideastern powers and China. So to have the ethnic¹⁴ strife¹⁵, the civil war and high-range missile anti-aircraft batteries is quite ominous¹⁶ and something we would want to prevent," said Quinn.

As investigators search for clues, airline experts want a global summit to address this new dynamic in local conflicts.