The first and foremost response to any incident is rapid rescue and for sympathy to victims, survivors, and those that loved them.Timely alerting and accurate aircraft position is the key to rapid response.
Moving beyond rescue becomes recovery. At this point the motivation is to collect the remains of those lost and as much of the airplane itself. Assembly of the airplane parts into a skeleton gives a foundation to check and verify various failure scenarios.
Regardless of the cause of catastrophe, airplane structure and systems are designed to be fault tolerant. Crash survivability is a paramount endeavor. Materials are evaluated for their contributions to post-crash fire and smoke. While the first objective is to understand what led to the catastrophe, just as important is to understand what can be improved to enhance prevention and survivability.
