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Malaysian Passenger Plane Reportedly Shot Down Over Ukraine
An anonymous reader writes The Russian newswire service Interfax is reporting that a Malaysian passenger plane carrying 295 people was shot down with a Buk ground-to-air missile over Ukraine near the Russian border. The Associated Press cites an adviser to Ukraine's Interior Minister as the source. First reports are that it was mistaken for a Ukrainian AN-26.
Malaysia airlines confirms they lost contact with the plane (last known position), but there's no confirmation it was shot down (yet). The Ukrainian government accused Russia of shooting down a fighter jet in Ukrainian airspace last night. Reports indicate there are no survivors.
For those of us old enough to remember The USS Vincennes.
Best Slashdot Co
http://www.aeroinside.com/item...
Manpad cant reach this high.
This was a deliberate radar guided attack.
This is a capture of the message in the VK network sent by Russian GRU officer Strelkov admitting that he ordered the missile strike against the Malaysian jet: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bs...
Either Russia has given the insurgents some very high tech MANPADS or Russia shot the plane down using an air defense system like the S300.
Those are not the only two possibilities. Ukraine was complaining about Russian planes intruding on it's airspace just yesterday and it possesses plenty of weapons capable of shooting down a plane at that altitude.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
US manufactured aircraft. So American crash investigators being involved is SOP by all the international conventions that apply.
As noted by sib posts. A Russian is claiming credit, for the wrong airplane. Must have gotten their Vodka ration.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Translating from russian... "Near Torez (city) an An-26 airplane was just shot down, it crashed somewhere beyond "Progress" mine site. We warned beforehand - do not fly over "our zone". Here's another video proof of the next "birdfall". A birdie crashed down beyond terricon (mine excavation site), missed living areas. Population not harmed. We also allegedly have info on another SU-25 shot down".
We're also now getting reports on numerous posters trying to white-wash this tragedy and make it look either as if this plane was not shot, or as if it was shot down by UA air forces. Clearly, Russian propaganda machinery is in full shit-on mode.
And by the way, why would a commercial airliner fly through such an airspace anyway?
Each airline (and/or its regulatory overlords) will make its own decision as to where to (not) fly. The FAA told US based airlines to not fly over the region as a precaution. Apparently the Malaysian authorities came to a different risk evaluation. Or, they are still trying to figure out how to make a decision. Or they were ignored by the state flagged carrier.
I share your hope but not your optimism.
Your optimism is misplaced. Photos of the crash are on Reuters website, and reports of debris and body parts are coming in. The big question now is who shot it down. Most fingers are pointing at the pro-Russian rebels.
That was the same party telling it that was advertising other pearls of wisdom, like the fact that there were no mass artillery shelling in Sloviansk. Vice news did a nice video of it where they drove through the city showing the massive destruction from indiscriminate shelling, all while playing the audio of the denials of the Kiev representative.
Brought the whole "Goebbels saying that everything is fine on Eastern Front as the Red Army is shelling the very radio station he's holding the speech from" feeling.
It's not my primary source, but it's hardly surprising when something like this actually gets posted.
Because it is stuff that matters.
As opposed to all of the whining and bitching about Apple v Microsoft and other pointless stuff that goes on around here.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A Russian GRU officer had already taken credit for shooting down the plane on Twitter before it was realized the AN-26 he just shot down was a 777:
http://thehill.com/policy/inte...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... A large passenger aircraft Boeing 777, performing a flight between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur, was shot down in the eastern part of Ukraine. According to the General Staff of Ukrainian Armed Forces, the airplane was shot down by the Russian Buk missile system as the liner was flying at an altitude of 10,000 meters. Ukraine has no long-range air defence missile systems in this area. The plane was shot down, because the Russian air defence systems was affording protection to Russian mercenaries and terrorists in this area. Ukraine will present the evidence of Russian military involvement into the Boeing crash. The leader of the terrorists Igor Girkin (Strelkov) immediately commented on the airplane catastrophe, believing that it was the Ukrainian jet that crashed down: “In Torez An-26 was shot down, its crashes are lying somewhere near the coal mine “Progress”. We have warned everyone: do not fly in our skies.”
Two other airplanes (non-commercial with much lower loss of life and thus less interesting to news outlets I presume) were shot down within the week in similar airspace. Why aren't we discussing those?
Because non-commercial airplanes being shot down in a war zone is not an out-of-the-ordinary technical news... not unless there were interesting technical attributes to the story .ie. new anti-missile system technology, radar, anti-missile technology failure, etc.
A commercial jet, and a big one at that, being shot down in a war zone, then brings a whole bunch of technical topics to discuss? What lead to the airplane being mis-identified? What technical prevention mechanisms could have been used to prevent this? Would it be worth while to explore temporary expansion of flight routes to avert war zones? Etc, etc.
Go ahead and try to put a techie spin on it, but the point remains that we're only oogling over this because a bunch of people died, which not only seem distasteful, but again, has nothing to with the type of news this site represents.
No, that is only you putting that spin on it so that you can accuse others of distasteful oogling. Stop projecting... or not, whatever rocks your boat and gives you a moment to build faux moral outrage and pass it as your moral accomplishment of the day.
Russian separatists give themselves a huge black eye. A major Western economy fails to accept energy poverty. Dems are using illegal immigration to guarantee a huge loss four months from now. The UN got caught hiding Hamas missiles in one of the Gaza 'schools' they operate.
Bad day eh? Maybe head back to Vice and stare at pictures of dead pallys for a while and feel better. Off you go.
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19:00:
A tweet (in Russian) from a key Twitter account used by pro-Russian separatists, in which they claim to have captured a Buk surface-to-air missile system, has now been deleted, BBC Monitoring observes. Ukrainians say the Malaysian plane could have been downed with a Buk, but pro-Russian rebels have now denied they have it.
Strelkov is former GRU and a present day Russian operative stirring up shit in Ukraine on behalf of Putin and fellow travelers. He has been personally sanctioned by the EU for corrodinating the separatist insurgency. Read his Wikipedia page if you want more.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
compared to the other MAL17 flights it did appear to be off course in that region
According to CNN, it was due to weather on the regular flight path.
Too much of a coincidence for a plane to crash in a war zone where a fighter was shot down just the other day and a transport aircraft An-26 was shot down by a missile at 25,000ft couple of days ago. And by the way, why would a commercial airliner fly through such an airspace anyway?
No U.S. carrier has been allowed to fly over certain parts of Ukraine since the end of April, due to an FAA order.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Since we're trying for technical accuracy here, the SU-25 is not a fighter. Even a glance at the pictures makes that transparently obvious. It's a purpose-built ground attack aircraft, much like the well-known A-10 Warthog. Its only aim in life is to kill people, and destroy equipment and installations, on the ground. And it's pretty much defenceless against fighters, unless it can keep low enough to evade them by jinking.
So why do all the media call the SU-25 a fighter? Maybe it's just standard incompetence and ignorance, but you should always ask "cui bono?" ("who stands to gain?") Perhaps the current Ukrainian "government", and those who support it - because if the SU-25 is an armoured ground attack aircraft, the question arises: whom has it been sent to kill? And the only possible answer is "Ukrainian citizens". So, just like Saddam, Assad, and Qadafi, Poroshenko is "killing his own people". Given how often the US government uses that as a pretext for a savage, unrestrained attack (and how unwilling it would be to launch such an attack against Poroshenko) it's pretty obvious that it has a powerful interest in labelling the SU-25 as a "fighter".
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Not as many as you might think. World population only hit 1 billion around 1804 and didn't get to 2 billion until around 1927. It was still under 3 billion when I was born in 1952.
So, they apparently did have "that kind of hardware." Of course, today they're claiming they don't.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
A Google translation gives this:
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
KAL-007 (and no, James Bond was NOT aboard)
The Russians approached that Korean civilian airliner from behind, positively identified it, then shot it down with loss of all souls on board.
At the time, left-wing apologists all over the world went full-on "9-11 truther" foil-hat conspiracy mode and tried to blame others, including the US govt, for the shootdown (one former Carter administration officiel even made money from a book he wrote trying to blame it on Reagan). Unfortunately for their misguided cause, the radio communications between the Russian fighter pilots and their ground controllers (which contained both the explicit ID and the shootdown orders) had been heard and recorded by multiple stations - none of the conspiracy theories were valid - the Russians, in full-Communist-era-paranoid mode had intentionally shot down a civilian plane full of people for straying into their airspace (which the blackboxes later showed was the result of a simple pilot error in configuring his navigation system before he tookoff)
Which is precisely the reason commercial flight corridors and hundreds of miles wide.
The "rebels" are in a good part active-duty Russian army and special forces personnel with no distinctions, so I wouldn't claim "very little training".
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
That's not correct but the coincidence is even better than that. After their first failed assassination attempt of the day, the assassin moved to a restaurant that he believed would be along the Archduke's return path (it wasn't). The duke's driver went the wrong way and when the Governor saw that it was the wrong path ordered the driver to reverse and go another direction. The driver stopped the car in front of the restaurant the assassin had chosen, literally right in front of him. The assassin had to merely take two steps forward and shoot the Archduke from about 5 feet away.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I'll enlist for Kansas.
I'd be tempted to make a joke here, but Kansas already has a similar political proxy war in its history. Makes it much less funny.
160 years later, and evil looks pretty much the same.
If something looks like a duck, acts like a duck then it must be a duck. I heard plenty of stories of eye witnesses, now refugees from Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Saw hours of videos, photos, TV news etc. This is not a civil war. There are roughly 10,000 armed armed terrorists paid by ex-president Yanukovich, certain oligarchs and supported by Putin. Their goals are - to further destabilize Ukraine economically, politically; chop off a few more regions if possible, keep new UA government from making any reforms, generally keep UA attached to Russia, try to save property - production plants, mines, etc. Try to save control over certain regions. And they're failing, but we still have a very, very long way to go. For instance, the whole destabilization thing is likely to go on while Putin is in power, which may or may not last for long.
So Ukraine intelligence is recording separatist traffic and giving it to the media. Among these are two calls between some "Major" johnny-on-the-spot reporting to someone called "Greek":
One call:
Greek: "Yes Major!"
Major: "Kazaks from the Chernukhino checkpoint shot down the plane."
The above is abridged; the audio has a lot more speech and this is an alternate translation:
Major: "Well, these were <guys from> Chernukhino who shot the plane. From Chernukhino checkpoint. The Cossacks that are standing at Chernukhino."
Next call:
Greek: "What's the news?"
Major: "I mean, it's definitely a civilian aircraft."
Greek: "Were there many people?"
Major: "A fuck ton. The debris rained right into the yards"
Greek: "What's the aircraft?"
Major: "I haven't figured it out yet. I haven't reached the main section. I only looked at where the bodies began to fall."
Major: "There are remains of chair mounts, the chairs, the bodies."
So we've got separatist commanders taking credit for the shoot down before they knew it was civilian, Twitter posts celebrating captured Buk missiles deleted by separatists and captured traffic naming the shooters; the Russian equivalent of rednecks standing a post and firing missiles at unidentified aircraft.
Patton wanted to keep marching East and settle Uncle Joe after Germany fell. He might have saved us all about 70 years of this bullshit.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Article states of the bat that it was a vacant UN sponsored school building. To spin this as the UN being complicit in hiding Hamas missiles displays some remarkably reading comprehension problems.
Maybe the UN should start sponsoring schools in the
US. Obviously the education system failed you.