Funny because the expert on Newsnight from Janes, said that at that height, they wouldn't have been able to tell! Especially as they probably had no access to flight24 or civilian air traffic control systems.
Experts aren't always what they're cracked up to be. Even if IFF didn't work because it wasn't used, or working in the wrong mode the operators would have got the altitude and track. So high, near the border and no signs it was descending or manouvering. So basically no threat.
Experts aren't always what they're cracked up to be. Even if IFF didn't work because it wasn't used, or working in the wrong mode the operators would have got the altitude and track. So high, near the border and no signs it was descending or manouvering. So basically no threat.
Sure but you're talking as if the person operating it was properly trained, they may not have had more than a couple of weeks training if that.
Sure but you're talking as if the person operating it was properly trained, they may not have had more than a couple of weeks training if that.
Yep, hence why I think negligence/accident rather than deliberate targetting of a civil airliner. Try that simulator I linked earlier which only goes up to SA-6 but there are a lot of things to do before it'll let you push DBRB and launch. Most basic is getting the height, speed and trajectory which should tell you it's not much of a threat.
Flipside to this of course is the Ukrainian military also doesn't appear to be very well trained or motivated. But less likely they'd shoot as the target would be flying the wrong direction to be a threat.
I'm thinking it's looking all the more likely that it was a case of mistaken identity, although there may be some questions regarding that. Some comments in the GD thread made me go look and found this-
The 9S35 Fire Dome provides a limited search and acquisition capability, a tracking capability and CW illumination for terminal guidance of the semi-active homing SAM seekers. It incorporates an IFF interrogator, optical tracker, datalink, and is powered by the TELAR's gas turbine generator. A shared antenna is employed for two X-band transmit/receive channels. These respectively provide a pulsed mode for search and track functions, with linear chirp for compression, and a CW mode for illumination.
And later versions had passive target ID. I thought it had some form of IFF because generally it's a good idea to know what you're shooting at. Then again, pinging a transponder is also a way of ID'ng your presence and if there's anti-radar stuff like missiles or artillery lurking around, that can really spoil your day.
What makes me suspicious is the certainty with which America are claiming it was brought down by a single ground launched missile. By all accounts, they claimed this some 30 minutes after it happened. They know this but couldn't track MH370 for hours or even know where it went or which way.
On the basis of this diagram - and I accept it might be wrong - the flight paths on the right which lead from other parts of the globe towards Amsterdam do not appear to go near Ukraine which would be much further to the East:
This is a diagram of European airspace at 1pm GMT on a day when 90% of flights were "back to normal" following the Icelandic volcano. Hardly any are overflying Ukraine and none appear to have been overflying East Ukraine:
What makes me suspicious is the certainty with which America are claiming it was brought down by a single ground launched missile. By all accounts, they claimed this some 30 minutes after it happened. They know this but couldn't track MH370 for hours or even know where it went or which way.
No mystery. The US has no radar coverage of the waters off Malaysia. Its never needed to be able fight anyone there. Radar and electronic intelligence coverage requires bases, or a reason to put the limited number of satellite assets over an area. With the Ukraine, there are NATO listening stations that were designed to cover the old Warsaw Pact area nearby , US ships in the BlackSea, NATO radars in Poland and Romania, US fighters in Romania and Poland, and, if they are still deployed, US, NATO, French and British E3 AWACS radar planes in Poland, Romania and flying near the western Ukrainian border. There's also the possibilty that US, or allied , electronic intelligence aircraft were moseying nearby.
No mystery. The US has no radar coverage of the waters off Malaysia. Its never needed to be able fight anyone there. Radar and electronic intelligence coverage requires bases, or a reason to put the limited number of satellite assets over an area. With the Ukraine, there are NATO listening stations that were designed to cover the old Warsaw Pact area nearby , US ships in the BlackSea, NATO radars in Poland and Romania, US fighters in Romania and Poland, and, if they are still deployed, US, NATO, French and British E3 AWACS radar planes in Poland, Romania and flying near the western Ukrainian border. There's also the possibilty that US, or allied , electronic intelligence aircraft were moseying nearby.
In other words, they could have known that there was a ground to air missile weapon there perhaps many weeks beforehand, someone could have diverted the flight and brought it just low enough in the agreed airspace for range and invited it to be shot down on the basis that no one would have expected it to be there and regarded it as suspicious/military. The entire policy from the day after Sochi has been geared towards resurrecting the cold war. Some of the truly greats in post war politics must be looking down at it all with total repugnance. The few who are alive - Schmidt, Schroeder - are doing so. They probably recognise it is the psychology of ex doped up hippy twerps. Oh and a few in their dotage with a God complex like McCain who should have been heavily medicated long ago.
We know a plane has crashed.
We know other aircraft have been shot down
We know Russia's being blamed for supplying sophisticated weapons and troops to man them
We know the seperatists have/had Buk launchers
This doesn't automatically mean the seperatists did it. If the air defences are being run by trained Russians (or Ukrainians), they should have been aware the plane was in a civil air corridor and squawking a civil flight ID. We know it's transponder was working because sites had been tracking it. So a trained crew shouldn't have shot it down. Especially as there's zero gain and a lot to lose from shooting down a friendly aircraft.
Alternatively the crew wasn't so well trained and it was an accident.
Or just an accident.
Or for wild conspiracies, the Ukrainians did it so they could blame Russia. Again dumb. But see also-
During the court hearings, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence representatives stated that the airplane "could not be brought down by a Ukrainian missile" according to the forensic examination of the plane's debris, radar information and technical capabilities of the missiles. They also argued that the Soviet-made Identification friend or foe system of the missile in question would have prevented it from striking the Soviet-made airliner
So add overiding IFF to the list of things necessary before shooting down something friendly. Which presumably is possible given the An-26 was shot down..
The seperatists have claimed to have suitable Buk class SAMs. its not clear if these were captured or recent Russian immigrants. There's youtubes of rebel convoys with SAM vehicles in them that could reach thats high. There's also a picture taken today showing whats calimed to be a Buk launcher in Donetsk. There's nothing to say that anyone who has acquired one of these things, has adequate training - let alone the necessary radar and command support to know what they are shooting at, The story that they were shooting at another Ukrainian transport plane, is perfectly credible given they have shot several down already, and seem pretty paranoid. .
Both sides have been flooding the net with stories, but Occam would suggest that - if it was shot down over rebel held Donetsk , when the Ukrainians have no air threat from large aircraft, when the rebels have already shot IL76s and AN26s down, and when relevant SAM systems have been seen in Donetsk - it probably was shot down by the rebels.
No mystery. The US has no radar coverage of the waters off Malaysia. Its never needed to be able fight anyone there. Radar and electronic intelligence coverage requires bases, or a reason to put the limited number of satellite assets over an area. With the Ukraine, there are NATO listening stations that were designed to cover the old Warsaw Pact area nearby , US ships in the BlackSea, NATO radars in Poland and Romania, US fighters in Romania and Poland, and, if they are still deployed, US, NATO, French and British E3 AWACS radar planes in Poland, Romania and flying near the western Ukrainian border. There's also the possibilty that US, or allied , electronic intelligence aircraft were moseying nearby.
Thanks for that, I'm not aware of how things are tracked these days and by whom. You'd think a bloody great plane would appear on someone's radar somewhere though. There was long enough for it to register somewhere, so we are told.
I find it a bit previous that America are all over the media claiming it's Russia's doing. With tensions high around the world and in that area particularly, wouldn't it be better to allow investigators to do their work before jumping to conclusions and going public with them?
The seperatists have claimed to have suitable Buk class SAMs. its not clear if these were captured or recent Russian immigrants. There's youtubes of rebel convoys with SAM vehicles in them that could reach thats high. There's also a picture taken today showing whats calimed to be a Buk launcher in Donetsk.
Kind of dubious about images with metadata removed, but if it's the one on the civilian transporter, probably seperatist. There are also reports that the Ukranians have their own in the area because there have been reports of the seperatists flying at least one An-25.
There's nothing to say that anyone who has acquired one of these things, has adequate training - let alone the necessary radar and command support to know what they are shooting at, The story that they were shooting at another Ukrainian transport plane, is perfectly credible given they have shot several down already, and seem pretty paranoid.
I think you'd need a fair bit of training before you could get a missile to leave the rails. Basics would be to feed an intercept trajectory to the missile before it'd launch. Once it's close enough, then the missile's seeker can take over. Plus they've managed to shoot down that An-26 and possibly some other aircraft. They wouldn't necessarily need any other radar or command support because the Buk variant shown is a combined radar/launcher.
Both sides have been flooding the net with stories, but Occam would suggest that - if it was shot down over rebel held Donetsk , when the Ukrainians have no air threat from large aircraft, when the rebels have already shot IL76s and AN26s down, and when relevant SAM systems have been seen in Donetsk - it probably was shot down by the rebels.
Moments ago Ukraine released what may be just that missing "YouTube" link, when it unveiled a 2:23 minute video supposedly proving that "militants of "Bes" group shot down with a Russian anti-aircraft missile a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 passenger jet heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur."
And yet, something here smells very fishy...
First, the Russian version of the clip which was released in parallel, and shown below, there is a major discrepancy in the time stamp, with the English-dubbed version showing the conversation between Major and Grek taking place at 5:11 pm and 5:32 pm, while the original one has it at 4:33 pm, 5:14 pm and 5:32 pm.
Then there is what gmorder has revealed is either a clearly erroneous creation timestamp, or the video was actually made yesterday.
Finally, we clearly have no way of authenticating the recording or the participants, it was just over a month ago, on June 5, when in another attempt to cast blame and discredit the separatists, Ukraine released another trademark YouTube clip seeking to disparage and frame Kozitsyn, titled "Russian Cossack Formations are Responsible For Chaos In Ukraine."
What is quite striking is that the production quality is identical between the two clips, in everything from the design, to the scene and caption selection to the layout of the dubbing. All done very professionally
Not sure what to make of this but certainly wasted no time in getting this together and publishing it.
*still fence sitting and suspicious.
Seeing as there's a thunderstorm, my conspiracy. The calls are spliced together from seperate events, ie the shoot-down of the transport earlier and then the discovery of the airliner wreckage. But I still think it was shot down by mistake.
As I posted on the other thread, it seems the entire english language MSM failed to pick up on the fact that not just one BUK missile launcher, but a whole anti aircraft garrison in Donetsk was captured on June 29th by fighters of the special division of the army of the Donetsk People's Republic
As I posted on the other thread, it seems the entire english language MSM failed to pick up on the fact that not just one BUK missile launcher, but a whole anti aircraft garrison in Donetsk was captured on June 29th by fighters of the special division of the army of the DPR
Yeh, I knew they had captured a bunch of stuff & posted a link showing the tank maintenance plant in E.Ukraine when people were wondering where the seperatists got tanks from. One thing Ukraine isn't short of is ex-Russian weaponry. I hadn't realised quite how close that air defence base was to rebel central though
But if you speak Russian, do you know what state the airport is in? Airports mean ATC and if that's in seperatist control, another radar, and possibly another reason why the seperatists could/should have known the aircraft wasn't a threat.
Thanks for that, I'm not aware of how things are tracked these days and by whom. You'd think a bloody great plane would appear on someone's radar somewhere though. There was long enough for it to register somewhere, so we are told.
I find it a bit previous that America are all over the media claiming it's Russia's doing. With tensions high around the world and in that area particularly, wouldn't it be better to allow investigators to do their work before jumping to conclusions and going public with them?
As I understand it, the mystery with the missing plane is if it flew near Singapore why they didn't pick it up. Singapore has a very well armed, and trained ,defence force with very modern equipment- and as it doesn't like its neighbours would know whats going on locally. Ground based active radar though only works for 100-200 miles off shore and no one in the region has the bigger more expensive types of radar that looks further. Malaysia isn't anything like so advanced in the defence field, and Indonesia has a massive alnd and sea area to cover.
The US reports are suggesting the DSP satellites may have picked up the rocket firing on its way up to hit the airliner over Donetsk. These are the current version of the early warning satellites, originally designed to pick up Soviet missile launches. They seem to be able to pick up tactical missile launches in Syria, so smaller surface to air missiles may trigger them too. They react to the hot plume from the rocket exhaust, but wouldn't track aircraft There's also US anti-missile radars, in Turkey and Israel , which cover as far as Iran - no one is saying what they can pick up, or when its how high, or what else they might be pointed at. Not sure what the US Navy has in the Black Sea either - the cruiser there has just left, but a destroyer with the Aegis system would have a very long range, plus possibly a capability to pick up surface to air missile radar signals. You also have all sorts of people, not least the Ukrainians, listening in to any radio or phone communications going on -the Ukrainians have already released what they claim is evidence from there - but no one else is going to talk about what they heard.
The problem with the investigators sorting it out is that they can't get there - as its in a rebel held area.The Russians have helpfully suggested they could look at the black box....... which may be like asking the fox to say who invaded the chicken coop.
As I understand it, the mystery with the missing plane is if it flew near Singapore why they didn't pick it up.
People may get put off flying if they knew how many 'dark' zones there are for civil radars.
The US reports are suggesting the DSP satellites may have picked up the rocket firing on its way up to hit the airliner over Donetsk. These are the current version of the early warning satellites, originally designed to pick up Soviet missile launches. They seem to be able to pick up tactical missile launches in Syria, so smaller surface to air missiles may trigger them too. They react to the hot plume from the rocket exhaust, but wouldn't track aircraft
Challenge with the IRsats is the more sensitive you make them, the more false alarms you'd pick up. Or even just data rate challenges. More events, more data you'd need to send from sat to earth station and that's constrained. Plus it'd need to be in the right place at the right time. And most of it's classified.
There's also US anti-missile radars, in Turkey and Israel , which cover as far as Iran - no one is saying what they can pick up, or when its how high, or what else they might be pointed at. Not sure what the US Navy has in the Black Sea either - the cruiser there has just left, but a destroyer with the Aegis system would have a very long range, plus possibly a capability to pick up surface to air missile radar signals.
Don't forget physics. Ship based systems are only a few metres above sea level so would have to account for any curvature or obstructions between them and target. Land-based radars may similarly be obstructed, even though a lot of Ukraine is pretty flat. So by the time the missiles climbed enough to be detected, it may not be possible to track back to an exact launch location. The launcher would start it off in the right general direction but the missile would steer once launched. If the ATC at Donetsk has a decent radar and it was working, that probably could detect a missile. Failing that, Russia almost certainly has radars close by that can and it may help them if they make data available.
The problem with the investigators sorting it out is that they can't get there - as its in a rebel held area.The Russians have helpfully suggested they could look at the black box....... which may be like asking the fox to say who invaded the chicken coop.
I suspect the UN will tell them later to hand it over to an international team. Russia has no claim to it and I'd not entirely trust the Ukrainians with it either. It also may not show much other than a bunch of alarms and catastrophic failure, which may exclude a missile. As far as I can find, the SA-11 warhead's proximity fuzed so may be more conclusive to find fragments in the wreckage.
In May, Ukraine banned Russian passenger airplanes from flying in airspace towards Donetsk and Kharkiv. What measures were taken to deal with a Russian passenger airplane if it breached that rule? Given that the ban would have been designed to prevent a passenger airplane being used for non-civilian purposes, ie an attack, it would be logical to think that any measures would have been military ones including the deployment of suitable hardware. The country in Europe with the most Surface to Air Missiles, including BUKs, outside Russia has long been Ukraine.
Aeroflot is just one Russian airline which has Boeing 777s. An innocuous flight from Malaysia could easily have been misinterpreted by the Ukrainian military as a Russian flight amidst the chaos and shot down. There is no reason to believe that rebels in Ukraine had the wherewithal to use such technology, whatever their statements of bravado. Even if they did, the sheer amount of SAM technology, built by the Russians years ago, in the ownership of Ukraine suggests that any accusation that it was recently shipped in by the Russians really needs concrete proof.
I am not convinced that the route was a "motorway in the sky" from Asia to Europe as the BBC suggests. The fact that just three aircraft travelled through the same airspace within two hours of the incident suggests quite the opposite. Finally, my condolences to relatives of all the victims including those who were to attend the meeting of the International Aids Society. It appears that a number of very senior experts in that field have sadly been lost.
Looks like Putin and Russia will soon be completely isolated. If Russia had any hand in this and supplied the armaments that brought down this plane, they will be in deep s**t.
[In a post on VKontakte, Russia's largest social media site, which has since been taken down, separatist leader Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, wrote: "In the vicinity of Torez, we just downed a plane, an AN-26. It is lying somewhere in the Progress Mine. We have issued warnings not to fly in our airspace. We have video confirming. The bird fell on a waste heap. Residential areas were not hit. Civilians were not injured."
The AN-26 is a Soviet-built twin-engine transport plane used by the Ukrainian military. Torez is a small city of 80,000 located some 40 kilometers east of Donetsk. Included in the post were two videos that showed a rising plume of black smoke in the distance.
The claim was posted at 5:50 pm Moscow time, shortly before reports surfaced that the Malaysian civilian aircraft, on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, had crashed in eastern Ukraine in the same area near the Russian border. /I]
Thanks for that, I'm not aware of how things are tracked these days and by whom. You'd think a bloody great plane would appear on someone's radar somewhere though. There was long enough for it to register somewhere, so we are told.
I find it a bit previous that America are all over the media claiming it's Russia's doing. With tensions high around the world and in that area particularly, wouldn't it be better to allow investigators to do their work before jumping to conclusions and going public with them?
Doesn't surprise me one bit. It looks like Archduke Franz Ferdinand & the Lusitania all rolled into one. The sociopathic war mongering neo-cons [and their camp followers here in Europe] will exploit any tragedy ruthlessly to stampede us to war with Russia to stop America losing the petro dollar and as stop the US economy from crashing.
I think this was a mistake - the so-called intercepted rebel telephone call makes out they didn't really know what it was untill it hit the ground and people there saw the decals.
They thought it was a Ukrainian Transport Plane.
Trouble is the Black boxes re off to Russia now - can we trust them?
Moments ago Ukraine released what may be just that missing "YouTube" link, when it unveiled a 2:23 minute video supposedly proving that "militants of "Bes" group shot down with a Russian anti-aircraft missile a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 passenger jet heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur."
And yet, something here smells very fishy...
First, the Russian version of the clip which was released in parallel, and shown below, there is a major discrepancy in the time stamp, with the English-dubbed version showing the conversation between Major and Grek taking place at 5:11 pm and 5:32 pm, while the original one has it at 4:33 pm, 5:14 pm and 5:32 pm.
Then there is what gmorder has revealed is either a clearly erroneous creation timestamp, or the video was actually made yesterday.
Finally, we clearly have no way of authenticating the recording or the participants, it was just over a month ago, on June 5, when in another attempt to cast blame and discredit the separatists, Ukraine released another trademark YouTube clip seeking to disparage and frame Kozitsyn, titled "Russian Cossack Formations are Responsible For Chaos In Ukraine."
What is quite striking is that the production quality is identical between the two clips, in everything from the design, to the scene and caption selection to the layout of the dubbing. All done very professionally
Not sure what to make of this but certainly wasted no time in getting this together and publishing it.
*still fence sitting and suspicious.
I read the transcript on another site but without the analysis. The video/transcript has been sent to be scrutinised.
Personally, I think the rebels shot it down by mistake - If the rebels were the first to be on the spot when the plane came down, and the black box' has been sent to Moscow, I doubt we'll ever find out the truth.
I think this was a mistake - the so-called intercepted rebel telephone call makes out they didn't really know what it was untill it hit the ground and people there saw the decals.
They thought it was a Ukrainian Transport Plane. Trouble is the Black boxes re off to Russia now - can we trust them?
No, I wouldn't.
Putin is quick to blame Ukraine yet the (probable) guilt lies mainly the Russian Colonel Igor Strelkov the leader of proRussian separatists.
[In a post on VKontakte, Russia's largest social media site, which has since been taken down, separatist leader Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, wrote: "In the vicinity of Torez, we just downed a plane, an AN-26. It is lying somewhere in the Progress Mine. We have issued warnings not to fly in our airspace. We have video confirming. The bird fell on a waste heap. Residential areas were not hit. Civilians were not injured."
The AN-26 is a Soviet-built twin-engine transport plane used by the Ukrainian military. Torez is a small city of 80,000 located some 40 kilometers east of Donetsk. Included in the post were two videos that showed a rising plume of black smoke in the distance.
The claim was posted at 5:50 pm Moscow time, shortly before reports surfaced that the Malaysian civilian aircraft, on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, had crashed in eastern Ukraine in the same area near the Russian border. /I]
It all points to the pro-Russian separatists. I have no doubt that they made a mistake, but they shouldn't have been firing at any planes in the first time. Who trained the terrorists to use this equipment? Russians? If I were Putin, I'd be sh***ing myself right now.
Rebel groups had previously been boasting on twitter about having captured a ground to air missile system and it's subsequent use to shoot down Ukrainian military supply aircraft. There's little doubt that the Malaysian passenger jet was shot down.
There's a semantic argument whether it was a deliberate act or not but that only centres around not identifying said plane as a commercial aircraft - however the act of shooting down an aircraft was a deliberate act.
Putin has tried to suggest it's a Ukrainian problem but evidence has apparently been growing about him supplying rebels with weapons and there's some talk that it might have been a Russian missile that was used. Either way international pressure on Putin is going to grow rapidly on the back of this incident. He won't be able to brush it aside.
Questions are also being asked of the Malaysian airways as to why they were still flying this route when other world airlines were not, particularly in light of recent events in the area. To say their response has been jaw droppingly casual in that regard is an understatement judging from what I heard from a Malaysian press conference. Ultimately it's not their fault someone shot their plane down, but arguably by tempting fate by continuing to fly over that region they have to shoulder a degree of responsibility. If it wasn't in that airspace all those passengers and crew would still be alive. Having said that however, such a debate should not be allowed to deflect attention away from Putin and his part in all this. If ultimately his supporting role (through supplying arms and support) has facilitated the events that resulted in this incident then he needs to answer for it just as much as the person who fired the missile.
Comments
Experts aren't always what they're cracked up to be. Even if IFF didn't work because it wasn't used, or working in the wrong mode the operators would have got the altitude and track. So high, near the border and no signs it was descending or manouvering. So basically no threat.
Yep, hence why I think negligence/accident rather than deliberate targetting of a civil airliner. Try that simulator I linked earlier which only goes up to SA-6 but there are a lot of things to do before it'll let you push DBRB and launch. Most basic is getting the height, speed and trajectory which should tell you it's not much of a threat.
Flipside to this of course is the Ukrainian military also doesn't appear to be very well trained or motivated. But less likely they'd shoot as the target would be flying the wrong direction to be a threat.
What makes me suspicious is the certainty with which America are claiming it was brought down by a single ground launched missile. By all accounts, they claimed this some 30 minutes after it happened. They know this but couldn't track MH370 for hours or even know where it went or which way.
http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2013/07/23/amsterdam.png
This is a diagram of European airspace at 1pm GMT on a day when 90% of flights were "back to normal" following the Icelandic volcano. Hardly any are overflying Ukraine and none appear to have been overflying East Ukraine:
https://airlineworld.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/european_airspace_seven_days_after_icelandic_volcano.jpg?w=500&h=553
ICAO officially confirmed on 9th July that the airspace over Crimea belongs to Ukraine rather than Russia.
Reports do not suggest at this time that any US citizens are among the casualties but some are European.
No mystery. The US has no radar coverage of the waters off Malaysia. Its never needed to be able fight anyone there. Radar and electronic intelligence coverage requires bases, or a reason to put the limited number of satellite assets over an area. With the Ukraine, there are NATO listening stations that were designed to cover the old Warsaw Pact area nearby , US ships in the BlackSea, NATO radars in Poland and Romania, US fighters in Romania and Poland, and, if they are still deployed, US, NATO, French and British E3 AWACS radar planes in Poland, Romania and flying near the western Ukrainian border. There's also the possibilty that US, or allied , electronic intelligence aircraft were moseying nearby.
In other words, they could have known that there was a ground to air missile weapon there perhaps many weeks beforehand, someone could have diverted the flight and brought it just low enough in the agreed airspace for range and invited it to be shot down on the basis that no one would have expected it to be there and regarded it as suspicious/military. The entire policy from the day after Sochi has been geared towards resurrecting the cold war. Some of the truly greats in post war politics must be looking down at it all with total repugnance. The few who are alive - Schmidt, Schroeder - are doing so. They probably recognise it is the psychology of ex doped up hippy twerps. Oh and a few in their dotage with a God complex like McCain who should have been heavily medicated long ago.
The seperatists have claimed to have suitable Buk class SAMs. its not clear if these were captured or recent Russian immigrants. There's youtubes of rebel convoys with SAM vehicles in them that could reach thats high. There's also a picture taken today showing whats calimed to be a Buk launcher in Donetsk. There's nothing to say that anyone who has acquired one of these things, has adequate training - let alone the necessary radar and command support to know what they are shooting at, The story that they were shooting at another Ukrainian transport plane, is perfectly credible given they have shot several down already, and seem pretty paranoid. .
Both sides have been flooding the net with stories, but Occam would suggest that - if it was shot down over rebel held Donetsk , when the Ukrainians have no air threat from large aircraft, when the rebels have already shot IL76s and AN26s down, and when relevant SAM systems have been seen in Donetsk - it probably was shot down by the rebels.
Thanks for that, I'm not aware of how things are tracked these days and by whom. You'd think a bloody great plane would appear on someone's radar somewhere though. There was long enough for it to register somewhere, so we are told.
I find it a bit previous that America are all over the media claiming it's Russia's doing. With tensions high around the world and in that area particularly, wouldn't it be better to allow investigators to do their work before jumping to conclusions and going public with them?
Kind of dubious about images with metadata removed, but if it's the one on the civilian transporter, probably seperatist. There are also reports that the Ukranians have their own in the area because there have been reports of the seperatists flying at least one An-25.
I think you'd need a fair bit of training before you could get a missile to leave the rails. Basics would be to feed an intercept trajectory to the missile before it'd launch. Once it's close enough, then the missile's seeker can take over. Plus they've managed to shoot down that An-26 and possibly some other aircraft. They wouldn't necessarily need any other radar or command support because the Buk variant shown is a combined radar/launcher.
Agreed.
Moments ago Ukraine released what may be just that missing "YouTube" link, when it unveiled a 2:23 minute video supposedly proving that "militants of "Bes" group shot down with a Russian anti-aircraft missile a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 passenger jet heading from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur."
And yet, something here smells very fishy...
First, the Russian version of the clip which was released in parallel, and shown below, there is a major discrepancy in the time stamp, with the English-dubbed version showing the conversation between Major and Grek taking place at 5:11 pm and 5:32 pm, while the original one has it at 4:33 pm, 5:14 pm and 5:32 pm.
Then there is what gmorder has revealed is either a clearly erroneous creation timestamp, or the video was actually made yesterday.
Finally, we clearly have no way of authenticating the recording or the participants, it was just over a month ago, on June 5, when in another attempt to cast blame and discredit the separatists, Ukraine released another trademark YouTube clip seeking to disparage and frame Kozitsyn, titled "Russian Cossack Formations are Responsible For Chaos In Ukraine."
What is quite striking is that the production quality is identical between the two clips, in everything from the design, to the scene and caption selection to the layout of the dubbing. All done very professionally
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-17/ukraine-releases-youtube-clip-proving-rebels-shot-down-malaysian-flight-mh-17
Not sure what to make of this but certainly wasted no time in getting this together and publishing it.
*still fence sitting and suspicious.
Seeing as there's a thunderstorm, my conspiracy. The calls are spliced together from seperate events, ie the shoot-down of the transport earlier and then the discovery of the airliner wreckage. But I still think it was shot down by mistake.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%D0%90-1402&src=typd
anti-aircraft missile Air Defence Regiment No. A-1402 (полк ПВО № А-1402) in Donetsk was captured
http://rusvesna.su/news/1404041521
twitter conversation with comments showing incredulity that the Ukrainian army had let this arsenal fall into rebel hands
https://twitter.com/lennutrajektoor/status/483281165479313408
location of base
http://maps.google.com/maps?daddr=48.05983876718198,37.73896317038086
Yeh, I knew they had captured a bunch of stuff & posted a link showing the tank maintenance plant in E.Ukraine when people were wondering where the seperatists got tanks from. One thing Ukraine isn't short of is ex-Russian weaponry. I hadn't realised quite how close that air defence base was to rebel central though
But if you speak Russian, do you know what state the airport is in? Airports mean ATC and if that's in seperatist control, another radar, and possibly another reason why the seperatists could/should have known the aircraft wasn't a threat.
As I understand it, the mystery with the missing plane is if it flew near Singapore why they didn't pick it up. Singapore has a very well armed, and trained ,defence force with very modern equipment- and as it doesn't like its neighbours would know whats going on locally. Ground based active radar though only works for 100-200 miles off shore and no one in the region has the bigger more expensive types of radar that looks further. Malaysia isn't anything like so advanced in the defence field, and Indonesia has a massive alnd and sea area to cover.
The US reports are suggesting the DSP satellites may have picked up the rocket firing on its way up to hit the airliner over Donetsk. These are the current version of the early warning satellites, originally designed to pick up Soviet missile launches. They seem to be able to pick up tactical missile launches in Syria, so smaller surface to air missiles may trigger them too. They react to the hot plume from the rocket exhaust, but wouldn't track aircraft There's also US anti-missile radars, in Turkey and Israel , which cover as far as Iran - no one is saying what they can pick up, or when its how high, or what else they might be pointed at. Not sure what the US Navy has in the Black Sea either - the cruiser there has just left, but a destroyer with the Aegis system would have a very long range, plus possibly a capability to pick up surface to air missile radar signals. You also have all sorts of people, not least the Ukrainians, listening in to any radio or phone communications going on -the Ukrainians have already released what they claim is evidence from there - but no one else is going to talk about what they heard.
The problem with the investigators sorting it out is that they can't get there - as its in a rebel held area.The Russians have helpfully suggested they could look at the black box....... which may be like asking the fox to say who invaded the chicken coop.
People may get put off flying if they knew how many 'dark' zones there are for civil radars.
Challenge with the IRsats is the more sensitive you make them, the more false alarms you'd pick up. Or even just data rate challenges. More events, more data you'd need to send from sat to earth station and that's constrained. Plus it'd need to be in the right place at the right time. And most of it's classified.
Don't forget physics. Ship based systems are only a few metres above sea level so would have to account for any curvature or obstructions between them and target. Land-based radars may similarly be obstructed, even though a lot of Ukraine is pretty flat. So by the time the missiles climbed enough to be detected, it may not be possible to track back to an exact launch location. The launcher would start it off in the right general direction but the missile would steer once launched. If the ATC at Donetsk has a decent radar and it was working, that probably could detect a missile. Failing that, Russia almost certainly has radars close by that can and it may help them if they make data available.
I suspect the UN will tell them later to hand it over to an international team. Russia has no claim to it and I'd not entirely trust the Ukrainians with it either. It also may not show much other than a bunch of alarms and catastrophic failure, which may exclude a missile. As far as I can find, the SA-11 warhead's proximity fuzed so may be more conclusive to find fragments in the wreckage.
http://rbth.co.uk/news/2014/05/02/ukraine_bans_russian_passenger_planes_from_entering_donetsk_kharkiv_airp_36385.html)
Aeroflot is just one Russian airline which has Boeing 777s. An innocuous flight from Malaysia could easily have been misinterpreted by the Ukrainian military as a Russian flight amidst the chaos and shot down. There is no reason to believe that rebels in Ukraine had the wherewithal to use such technology, whatever their statements of bravado. Even if they did, the sheer amount of SAM technology, built by the Russians years ago, in the ownership of Ukraine suggests that any accusation that it was recently shipped in by the Russians really needs concrete proof.
I am not convinced that the route was a "motorway in the sky" from Asia to Europe as the BBC suggests. The fact that just three aircraft travelled through the same airspace within two hours of the incident suggests quite the opposite. Finally, my condolences to relatives of all the victims including those who were to attend the meeting of the International Aids Society. It appears that a number of very senior experts in that field have sadly been lost.
So do I. This is interesting.
[In a post on VKontakte, Russia's largest social media site, which has since been taken down, separatist leader Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, wrote: "In the vicinity of Torez, we just downed a plane, an AN-26. It is lying somewhere in the Progress Mine. We have issued warnings not to fly in our airspace. We have video confirming. The bird fell on a waste heap. Residential areas were not hit. Civilians were not injured."
The AN-26 is a Soviet-built twin-engine transport plane used by the Ukrainian military. Torez is a small city of 80,000 located some 40 kilometers east of Donetsk. Included in the post were two videos that showed a rising plume of black smoke in the distance.
The claim was posted at 5:50 pm Moscow time, shortly before reports surfaced that the Malaysian civilian aircraft, on a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, had crashed in eastern Ukraine in the same area near the Russian border. /I]
Doesn't surprise me one bit. It looks like Archduke Franz Ferdinand & the Lusitania all rolled into one. The sociopathic war mongering neo-cons [and their camp followers here in Europe] will exploit any tragedy ruthlessly to stampede us to war with Russia to stop America losing the petro dollar and as stop the US economy from crashing.
They thought it was a Ukrainian Transport Plane.
Trouble is the Black boxes re off to Russia now - can we trust them?
I read the transcript on another site but without the analysis. The video/transcript has been sent to be scrutinised.
Personally, I think the rebels shot it down by mistake - If the rebels were the first to be on the spot when the plane came down, and the black box' has been sent to Moscow, I doubt we'll ever find out the truth.
No, I wouldn't.
Putin is quick to blame Ukraine yet the (probable) guilt lies mainly the Russian Colonel Igor Strelkov the leader of proRussian separatists.
It all points to the pro-Russian separatists. I have no doubt that they made a mistake, but they shouldn't have been firing at any planes in the first time. Who trained the terrorists to use this equipment? Russians? If I were Putin, I'd be sh***ing myself right now.
There's a semantic argument whether it was a deliberate act or not but that only centres around not identifying said plane as a commercial aircraft - however the act of shooting down an aircraft was a deliberate act.
Putin has tried to suggest it's a Ukrainian problem but evidence has apparently been growing about him supplying rebels with weapons and there's some talk that it might have been a Russian missile that was used. Either way international pressure on Putin is going to grow rapidly on the back of this incident. He won't be able to brush it aside.
Questions are also being asked of the Malaysian airways as to why they were still flying this route when other world airlines were not, particularly in light of recent events in the area. To say their response has been jaw droppingly casual in that regard is an understatement judging from what I heard from a Malaysian press conference. Ultimately it's not their fault someone shot their plane down, but arguably by tempting fate by continuing to fly over that region they have to shoulder a degree of responsibility. If it wasn't in that airspace all those passengers and crew would still be alive. Having said that however, such a debate should not be allowed to deflect attention away from Putin and his part in all this. If ultimately his supporting role (through supplying arms and support) has facilitated the events that resulted in this incident then he needs to answer for it just as much as the person who fired the missile.