flight 17 was shot down over two days ago but investigators still do not have access to the crash site. an ntsb investigator has arrived in kiev from the united states and is now en route to the crash site in the eastern part of the country where there are reports of looting, gunfire has been heard nearby as we can report this evening. and the grim task of removing the bodies has started. david cameron has been slamming russian president vladimir putin over the plane. in the single times he writes, if the evidence does conclude that russia was involved, quote, this is the direct result of russia deestablishing a sovereign state. our phil black reports from the crash site tonight. reporter: this is where mh 17
hours for you. the route that malaysia airlines flight 17 flew is so popular when going from europe to asia, it has a name. it s called airway l-980. it s a key pathway to europe and asia, but by late thursday the airspace over eastern ukraine was empty. for more on this investigation i want to bring in greg feith, a former ntsb investigator and former airline captain haeger and safety expert john cox and nbc s long-time aviation correspondent, bob haeger. hello to all of you. greg, i want to start with you. is there any what are we going to learn from this crash site at this point? i ve just had a former senior official say to me the investigation on the ground might be pointless at this point. absolutely, chuck. i m very surprised at the fact that the ntsb would send anybody over there under these circumstances.
the plane lost communication with the ground. michael, thank you, very interesting. john, as an ntsb investigator, what does it tell you? well, you have to explore every piece of that. every single piece of it. how it got in there. was it perharogrammed from the ground, if you can. what the data stream said, there is probably more information on it. i was going to say it a little earlier that one voice communication, the good night, the little pause there was a little pause in it. the voice spectrum people will do sound analysis and see if they can hear switches. there is a lot of work going on. if they get them. no, off the tape. right, that they can hear themselves. what do you make of the new york times reporting on this? assuming this is accurate, of course. i still go with my theory because they re talking about so
up until now we ve been told that there is no information coming out of the system but now it seems there might have been and if so it was coming out of the system or some parallel system. if this turns out to be another false lead, it will be another instance of where this plane went utterly silent despite the ways in which it could communicate with the ground and just didn t. this has been strong enough to have the fleets move to the indian ocean believing that the airliner could have flown for four or five hours. tom foreman, thank you so much. joining us is bill palmer, in san diego. clive irving is also joining us, the former ntsb investigator is here in washington with me.
significant that the ntsb is there. let s talk to bob as an ntsb investigator. bob, you mentioned that politics is involved. of course, that always makes things a lot more complicated. if you were on the scene, what would be different about the information coming out of malaysia? if we were in charge of the investigation? uh-huh. i guess that we would have an authority there who is competent to deal with everything that s going on and wouldn t have any ax to grind. the ntsb is a technical agency. the u.s. government or the u.s. itself doesn t have any interest in this other than finding out what happened. i just find the andy pastor article remarkable. and it s one of a series of remarkable things that we