Investigating a Plane Crash

What are they trying to figure out? Are they trying to determine why the vehicle crashed? Are they trying to understand how the vehicle works (i.e. identify the technology, etc)?

In current accident investigations, one of the first things the investigators do is try to document the location and condition of all of the pieces of the aircraft. This often means lots of pictures and a detailed map of the debris field. Part of this is the so called "four corners" search. They want to find each of the four corners of the airplane: the nose, the tail structure and the tips of the wings. That helps define the attitude and behavior of the aircraft before it hit the ground. Current investigators try to interview any witnesses as soon as possible. And, of course, one of the primary goals is to recover the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder because those are goldmines of information about what was happening in the minutes leading up to the crash.

I don't know much about plane crashes, but they would put that yellow warning tape all around it.

As for something that they might notice, there would be some sort of exterior coating that would absorb electromagnetic radiation, so radar would not get any reflection from the thing. If you have decided on the propulsion system, then you might have the pilot figure that out, if it is something that Earthlings have invented also. Or the pilot might figure out some parts of it.

There are question that the OP left open.

King Neptune said:

I don't know much about plane crashes, but they would put that yellow warning tape all around it.

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The debris field is often too large to tape off the scene. Police might set up checkpoints/roadblocks if that makes sense, or simply patrol the area. It's a very different scene if the aircraft crashes on a remote mountainside versus into a neighborhood or into the ocean. They would certainly use warning tape when it made sense. There have been crashes where people stole parts of the aircraft debris and had to be tracked down to get them back.

Aerial said:

The debris field is often too large to tape off the scene. Police might set up checkpoints/roadblocks if that makes sense, or simply patrol the area. It's a very different scene if the aircraft crashes on a remote mountainside versus into a neighborhood or into the ocean. They would certainly use warning tape when it made sense. There have been crashes where people stole parts of the aircraft debris and had to be tracked down to get them back.

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Very true, but this is a UFO crash, and we don't know how big the thing is. The debris may be spread over an area tha size of a football field or smaller. We don't even know that it broke up.

I'm not sure how much use your team would be - a pilot who's not an investigator, and an investigator who doesn't specialize in air crashes.

If the vehicle has broken up, they probably won't be able to say much beyond "hey, bits of wreckage around here." If the vehicle is intact, they could determine it's not a known type. Investigator might be able to determine if there's radiation if s/he's brought the equipment. They'll probably be taking lots of photos.

What do you want them to discover?

There are plenty of aircraft out there that weren't made by a manufacturer. Home builds happen, and there are even people who make money out of building aircraft themselves - and, of course, there's always the 'What on earth did the Skunkworks dream up this time?' issue.

The simple way out to me is if your alien doesn't look human externally.
"Damn, Fred, I don't care what kinda hotshot pilot he was or what this thing is, who the hell needs five joysticks and no rudder pedals?"

A more complicated way out is if your alien has things that we can't make or needs things we don't.
"I know 3-D printing is a thing, Ted, but I'm kinda sure we can't make this," or "Why's this guy got a pack of fool's gold marked 'Emergency rations'?"

Then there's the obvious.
"Damn, that crater's gotta be twenty foot deep, but there's footprints coming out."

You have a pilot - who'll be familiar with the standard instruments fitted to every plane, and able to spot the oddities there - and an investigator, who might not be able to work out what's out of place, but can put the clues together. They'll know it's a crew of one if there's only space for one person. Things meant to go really fast through air tend to be streamlined, and they'll see that as well. Things meant to go extremely fast and yet have one person survive a crash intact are generally designed for it in some way; without knowing what technology your aliens have access to it's difficult to know what design changes there'd be (both for that and for maneuvering in space), but there should be something your two intelligent people can work out.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

Taylor Harbin said:

Thanks for the replies. The gist is that they find a craft that looks shoddily made and they discover it is an alien ship. They suspect this after realizing it isn't from a known human manufacturer and it hasn't been built for any other reason than to go real fast, to insert a single lifeform inside the human habitat.

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I hate to say it, but this kind of rings warning bells for me. "Shoddily made" and "go real fast" don't go together well if you're talking about a self-powered ship intended to have a service life. Higher speeds generally require better quality materials and engineering to keep some reasonable standard of safety/success. The crappy/simple solution can be reliable, especially if it's the equivalent of a capsule fired by a much higher quality "catapult", i.e. not a powered ship. Or you could have a civilization that's counting on 4 of its 5 pilots dying and only one making it to the goal. Then they might do the non-reusable ship design. I believe there was an aircraft designed during WWII that didn't have landing gear because they were intended as suicide vehicles, but I can't recall any more details atm.

I should also note that a craft designed to go really fast in space is totally different than a craft designed to go really fast in an atmosphere. They have conflicting design requirements, so you can't have both unless you're doing hand-wavy Star Trek science. The unpowered capsule is the simplest design that can sort of accomplish both. It will at least fall pretty fast through the atmosphere but it won't be steerable in any meaningful (airplane-like) sense once it's through re-entry.

Finally, the big question is how similar the alien technology would be to what your investigators are used to. If an honest-to-goodness alien spacecraft crashed on earth today, it would not take long for anyone knowledgeable to realize it's not an airplane because there's a large body of knowledge about what airplane parts look like. Even if it disintegrated into very small pieces it would only be a matter of time. Aircraft investigations involve collecting and identifying as many of the pieces as possible (down to wiring clusters and pieces of engine fan blades and water/air/hydraulic fluid/oil tubing and bolts/rivets), so if none of them look like what we know airplane pieces look like, then the investigators would eventually have to conclude it's not an airplane.