Another Malaysia airlines a/c down...

[TSR2]

I've been offline all day in meetings and only just picked this up. How utterly tragic. God bless them all.

[nigelb]

I can't believe this - so tragic. My thoughts are with the families of the crew and passengers. I am a bit skeptical of the claims that a missile fired by the seperatists could hit an airliner at 33,000 feet but I suppose it is possible, especially if they had the right equipment given to them by the Russians.. We will learn more when the investigators do their work at the scene. In the meantime there is a lot of speculation going on in the media, although to their credit, the BBC World News are careful to point out when the stories are not verified.

Nigel²

[TSR2]

The thing to remember is that IF it was shot down, and IF this was by separatists, Ukraine was (IS) a wash with suitable military hardware and they wouldn't have needed the Russians to provide them with anything new, they would have had access to it already from their take over of existing Ukrainian military bases in those areas. There a chap I work with who will be traveling on that very flight in two weeks time. He's counting his blessings that he couldn't get the time off earlier. So very sad.

[Scorpius]

Being an ex Elint type, I did some more homework on the probable culprit here, the SA-11 (Nato codename Gadfly) and it can operate autonomously without any search radar support as it has it's own limited search/track radars as part of the fit. It is mobile and can be ready to fire in less than 5 minutes. It is difficult to jam for any length of time.

While it is not point and shoot it is a nasty piece of work and is a development of the SA-6 Gainful that caused so much havoc to the Israeli's in the '73 war with it's CW radar target illuminator and tracker.

The Americans will however have recorded the radar transmissions from the intercept together with the infra-red bloom from the missile launch.

Lecture over, sorry.

Nev

[cstorey]

No apology needed, Nev. The information is very interesting in a matter as serious as this. It is also fascinating to see that no Russian aircraft will go anywhere near Ukraine airspace this morning : e.g from Cyprus to Moscow Transaero is routing almost as far east as the Caspian . Quite what the reason for this is, is very hard to guess, but it is plain that the Russians are very,very scared of the consequences of this murderous disaster , whoever perpetrated it

[TobyV]

Interesting graphic in Spiegel, showing some statistics for some recent flights of various operators that might pass over Ukraine. Of the selection presented here, seems only BA and Air France were really considering the SAM threat:

http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-726 ... 9-ocpi.jpg

Furthermore, with Crimean airspace closed (for political reasons rather than a credible military threat) it seems aircraft were thus forced to fly over the (from a military activity point of view) higher risk area around Donetsk.

All very sad and with the site basically unsecured for several days now, I am starting to believe it will basically be impossible to perform a meaningful investigation. Who knows where the black boxes will have disappeared to by now. It would be somewhat ironic if we one day find MH370's black boxes, thousands of metres below the sea, if we can never find two that landed in a field in the Ukraine.

EDIT - Black boxes now confirmed found and taken to Donetsk:
http://rt.com/news/174204-ukraine-fligh ... ers-plane/