This is fucking horrible. 
Very interesting. Of course, the plane could’ve diverged a bit off its flight path for any number of legit reasons. OTOH, is it possible the plane remained somewhat intact after the strike, and coasted in its decent that far south where it ultimately crashed?
Oooof.
There aren’t that many people running around Ukraine with a SAM system capable of shooting down a plane traveling at 30,000 feet. It’s either the Russian army, the Ukraine army, or the semi-pro Separatists. Assuming, for the moment, that this is stupidity instead of malice (in the absence of any rational reason to blow up a random civilian plane), I would look first at the amateurs. We’ll see.
Hopefully, someone who speaks Russian can say something about the article I linked above.
Your number three there shows that the Ukrainians fear their airspace being penetrated by Russian jets. They may well have decided to shoot first, and done so with their standard level of competence. Certainly we know the Ukrainians have SAMs in the Ukraine, we don’t know the Russians or separatists do.
Sure - prevailing winds, momentum from the direction of flight, possibly other factors I’m not remembering off the top of my head… It’s not uncommon for wreckage to come down miles from where an airplane had Something Bad occur.
A Russian jet penetrating Ukrainian airspace - from the west? :dubious:
I’ve seen some claims that the separatists have BUK systems they got when they overran some Ukrainian military bases earlier in the conflict.
All speculation at this point, of course, but I don’t think it’s out of the question that the separatists could have done this even without a direct gear transfer from Russia.
If it was coming from the direction of Russia I could see it. I don’t think they are afraid of air strikes coming from Amsterdam.
And a Ukraine transport plane was shot down from an altitude of over 20,000 just a little while ago. So I think it is well known that the Russian side has SAMs.
They certainly posted enough photos of themselves with some captured SAM systems. Here’s a link to one of them (they seem to be doing their best to delete them on the various social sites - like that’ll work!)
From the BBC’s live updates:
Oops.
I’ve read that, too. Here’s an English language article from the New Republic about the BUK system. Apparently it’s a soviet era machine that doesn’t have sophisticated identification capabilities. It claims that BUK operators can spot a plane, but can’t identify it in detail … which seems like the kind of thing you’d kind of want to include if you’re designing an anti-aircraft system … But what do I know.
It’s almost page 1 from the super villan playbook: 1 down a commercial airliner from a troubled area 2 ? 3 profit
This what I think happened, the SA-11 or SA-17, depending on what was used, is a brigade level air defense unit. For it to work properly, it needs a hand off from a tracking radar to give it Altitude and Attitude of the incoming track. Then its local radar aquires it and they fire. Wiki gives that missile a range of 36 miles/72000 ft.
I cant see the Russians giving anyone positive control over something like that system, for this particular reason, as well as they might have shot down a Russian aircraft by mistake. So I think Putin decided to up the ante, and made parts of the Ukraine a no fly zone. Smart people on the other end, are supposed to think for themselves and leave foreign flagged airliners alone, while shooting down Ukrainian airforce jets.
So, someone in the Russian air defense zone, tracked the airliner, and handed it off to that particular unit, without making sure that it was a Ukrainian aircraft, and not an airliner.
What the Ukraine needs to do right now , is to send out a NOTAM and declare its airspace closed.
Declan
I know that one can still buy tickets to Kiev from DC - under a thousand bucks for the round-trip, which actually isn’t bad! But that’s hundreds of miles from Donetsk, near where this plane went down.
Where is that Dutch tweet?
You mean this Facebook post?
Edit. Beaten by the actual FB page.
It may have crashed on its own. But since the last plane crash/disappearance was a Malaysian Airlines and this one is another, there must be at least a presumption this may have something to do with that airline. Like maybe someone has some kind of problem with that airline?
I know the probability is small. But surely there must be some probability.
Well, the separatists capturing a BUK system makes a hell of a lot more sense than the Russians giving some to these doofuses.