what is justice? 
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye.”
Ready for this story to get more awful? Me either. It’s being reported that there were dozens of AIDS researchers and activists on the plane on their way to a medical conference in Australia.
I know it’s MPSIMS (not quite sure why), but does anybody have any sense of how exactly air traffic control would work for this plane in that general area? I don’t mean specifically just the rebel areas, but pretty much all of Ukraine.
Does a plane from a foreign departure to a foreign destination flying over Ukraine check in with and get guidance from Ukrainian air traffic controllers along the way? Or do they just stay in high altitude and count on their transponders for “ad hoc” ATC?
I also wonder whether it can really tell anyone anything much about who fired the missile. I know little and less about black boxes, but my understanding is they won’t tell you anything that either the crew themselves or the aircraft’s onboard avionics couldn’t tell you. And I doubt either of those could say where the missile came from.
However, the black boxes might be shedding light on the story indirectly already.
The rumours that the separatists have shipped the black boxes off to Moscow, as well as Moscow’s inexplicable keenness to have boots on the ground at a crash site which has nothing to do with it (foreign country, no Russian nationals onboard, no urgency as no prospect of rescue), gives grounds for unfavourable inferences.
It’s safe to say that once any pieces, including the black boxes, cross the border into Russia, the weight to be attached to any evidence purportedly extracted from them will have to be very carefully appraised.
There is no earthly reason why all evidence should not be preserved on site for a UN-led or other multilateral investigation.
Guess Russia took a page out of the USSR’s playbook in KAL 007, grab the black box, if it doesn’t say anything good, sit on it.
How the US could track the missile.
If it was separatists, using a BUK system, what is the minimum crew needed, and how much training would they need? Could a ex air defense soldier train others to work the system?
Australian news reporting that one family that lost two family members on MH370 has lost two more on MH17.
It may be a moot point now, but some info can be inferred by which systems went offline, at what time, and in what order. These are recorded I assume, at the millisecond level (maybe even more accuracy nowadays). I base this on a conversation with a crash investigator many years ago. No personal experience of my own. Obviously won’t help with the who question.
I mean, sure, you can tell that a missile caused the crash, but the important bit here is who fired the missile.
It’s probably easy to tie the missile to the Ukrainian separatists.
So, what I REALLY want someone to find is evidence that Russia supplied the separatists with the missile. A black box isn’t going to do that.
What I really hope for is for Europe to finally decide to bite the bullet and do something. Maybe this is the spark that stops the appeasement.
According to Wikipedia:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia dixit]
A standard Buk battalion consists of a command vehicle, target acquisition radar (TAR) vehicle, six transporter erector launcher and radar (TELAR) vehicles and three transporter erector launcher (TEL) vehicles. A Buk missile battery consists of two TELAR and one TEL vehicle. The battery requires no more than 5 minutes to set up before it is ready for engagement and can be ready for transit again in 5 minutes. The reaction time of the battery from target tracking to missile launch is around 22 seconds
[/QUOTE]
However, it is not necessary to actually have a whole battery going on – a single TELAR vehicle is enough to shoot an aircraft down in the sky, for it has its own radar system for the launcher. The other components (especially the TAR vehicle) are for discriminating and choosing proper targets, but if you are just shooting it at something that comes towards you, a single TELAR should be enough.
With that said, then (also from Wikipedia, emphasis mine):
“TELAR superstructure is a turret containing the fire control radar at the front and a launcher with four ready-to-fire missiles on top. Each TELAR is operated by a crew of four and is equipped with CBRN protection. The radar fitted to each TELAR, referred to as the ‘Fire Dome’ by NATO, is a monopulse type radar and can begin tracking at the missile’s maximum range (32 km/20 mi) and can track aircraft flying at between 15m and 22km (50 to 72,000 ft) altitudes.”
Hmm… Not many people needed, then: Just four, to operate a single TELAR vehicle (which I think is likely to be what they would have used). I would say that it would not be particularly difficult to train some people to use it, especially if you have either “advisors” or ex-military there to give a hand, and even more if you forego the “let’s do proper discrimination and target identification” aspect of it (so, “here is a plane coming, just shoot it down”).
No cite for this, I’m afraid, but while listening to the BBC World Service on Thursday afternoon one interview brought up the black boxes going to Russia. The interviewee said that all black boxes of crashed planes in the former Soviet Union were sent to Russia due to some agreement and that it wasn’t necessarily nefarious that the boxes would go there.
We’d all like to do something, but what that something should be is no easy question.
Russia is no Afghanistan or Iraq. Military action is out of the question, unless anyone fancies WWIII with a side serving of nuclear holocaust for all.
That leaves political, economic and media pressure, which is not sexy enough to satisfy the outrage and does not give tangible results quickly.
Even that kind of pressure has its limits. European economy is inextricably intertwined with Russia’s through at least the gas and oil imports. There is only so far Europe can push Russia before it begins to seriously hurt itself.
To sever this link would take years if not decades. It is also very questionable whether ‘punishing’ Russia by ostracising it would improve Russia’s posture towards the West. Take North Korea - a pariah for decades and still no friendlier or less dangerous than it was at the beginning.
At least while Russia has serious money in the European game it has some incentive to maintain a certain bare minimum of goodwill and decorum. If Russia is completely cut out by Europe, where is any incentive to be even a minimally good neighbour?
This kind of outrage always calls for decisive action. But it is very difficult to think of decisive action that would also be the right action when judged in the cold light of day.
I don’t have the answer. Hopefully somebody does.
I hate burst your bubble, but the overwhelming likelyhood (> 99%) is that the seperatists got the missle system when they overran Ukrainian military bases earlier this year. At the start of the conflict, the Ukrainian army was pretty much running away screaming like a bunch of little girls. The seperatists likely have everything the Ukrainian army does.
True…and yet the Russians originally built the system (not important, but worth a mention); and, more to the point, surely provided recent instructions on how to use it – definitely indirectly (via ex-Russian military types being among the separatists), and possibly directly.
But the degree of Russian culpability hinges on something more important still: how they react now. As another poster mentioned, this is a chance for Russia to disengage from the separatists, and actively denounce them and work toward their elimination or at least neutralizing their effectiveness. This could happen, IF Russia gets something in return – I’m no expert, but Ukrainian assurances of a specific degree of autonomy (not full independence) for that eastern region might do the trick, no?
I just saw that reported by MSF/Doctors Without Borders; there may have been 100 researchers/activists/etc. by that report. Just horrifying.
Yeah, this ^
And in addition I’d venture to guess that the separatists have enough expertise (via former military?) to operate the stuff as well. Enough at least to give Russia plausible deniability. So both sides - Ukraine and Russia - are technically squawking correctly when they claim it wasn’t them. The separatists; not so much IMO.
I don’t know for sure, but given reports that the Ukraine army doesn’t have any missile system in the area that could reach that altitude, I’m not sure it’s possible to conclude that this missile was captured from the Ukraine military. Maybe they don’t have any missiles because the separatists took them, I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s cut a and dried at this point.
If the black box data indicates a particular part of the airplane went offline first then yes, it could give some indication of direction. The airplane would have been oriented along the line of travel, so if, say, the starboard wing went silent first it would indicate that side took the initial hit which would give some indication of a missile’s origin.
The other thing needed is reconstruction of the wreckage., which can also give an indication of which part of the airplane was hit first.