In all likelihood the victims' surviving family members do, in fact, care about what information is to be found on the recorders. Clearly the diplomatic initiatives, including presently at ICAO Council, show that the countries from which the victims hailed have reason to care.
Unless, that is, we are to look at the aftermath of the incident as nothing but an exercise in bloodless calculus of flight dynamics, explosive force, and missile trajectories. My contention is that only abject cynicism, or rankly amatuerish apologia for Iranian malfeasance, can explain such indifference.
Let's tick off some reasons for treating the recorders as part of, if you will, an international civil aviation crime scene, shall we?
Military action against airliners is nothing new; KAL007 some 36 and a half years ago is a commonly cited exemplar. But is it really being contended that the current aftermath of Ukrainian 752 is the best the international system can do? That the recorders should be shrugged off because there are, to the knowledge of the authoritative and expert aviators, no material facts about the shootdown to be uncovered? What about the fact that obtaining the output from the recorders will remove any uncertainty or disbelief held by the victims' families? Perhaps the pilots' final words on the CVR will hold meaning for their families, dark as this might be.
And Annex 13, if it could speak, do we now say it would just shrug at Iran's deliberate, willful lies at the initial phase of the aftermath? The CVR/FDR won't erase the lies but allowing Iran to play its unbelievably bad faith games about the recorders compounds the issue.
I'm not going to contend that obtaining the recorders will suddenly empower ICAO or some other civil aviation-related body (or group of organizations) to prevent future incidents of this nature. That is, I'm not going to argue that point here. And not while the in absentia Dutch trial in re: MH17 is in progress.
Last edited by WillowRun 6-3; 12th Mar 2020 at 01:26.