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Russia Prepares For Internet War Over Malaysian Jet
An anonymous reader writes The investigation of a Malaysian passenger jet shot down over Ukrainian rebel held territory is heating up. U.S. and U.K. news organizations are studiously trying to spread the blame, Russian ITAR, which, just earlier today was celebrating the downing of a large aircraft by rebel missiles in Torez (Google cache) is reporting that the rebels do not have access to the missiles needed for such attacks. The rebel commander who earlier today reported the downing of the aircraft has also issued a correction to earlier reports that they had captured BUK air defense systems with Russian sources now stating that the rebels do not posses such air defenses. The Ukrainian president has been attempting to frame the incident as a "terrorist attack". President Obama made contact with Vladimir Putin and has been instead treating it as an accident, calling it a "terrible tragedy" and saying that the priority is investigating whether U.S. citizens were involved. With control of the black box and its own internet propaganda army Russia may be in a good position to win the propaganda war.
I think I found it: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10976191/Malaysia-Airlines-crash-video-claims-to-show-missile-launcher-being-smuggled-into-Russia.html
Here is the story Malaysia Airlines plane crashes on Ukraine-Russia border - live
The video is referenced as
12.20 Tom Parfitt has picked up an intriguing Russian-language detail.
Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, has made the latest of a series of claims that a Buk missile launcher allegedly used by pro-Russian rebels to knock down Flight MH17 was smuggled away into Russia overnight. He highlights a video which purportedly shows the launcher with two of its missiles missing, writing "it's not hard to guess why".
“It was exactly these missiles which brought death to almost 300 innocent passengers of the ill-fated Malaysian Boeing,” he added.
Mr Gerashchenko says the video was made by Ukrainian intelligence agents at 4.50am as the launcher was on the move towards the Russian border near the town of Krasnodon.
We obviously can't confirm it's authenticity.
The video is found here Buk launcher video
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My guess is cost. Sending data via satellite is very expensive, and there's a lot of data recorded. As for ground stations, I'm not aware of any plane-to-ground data communications currently in use (other than radio for voice) so that would need a completely new infrastructure built.
Nope. Sorry to interrupt your speculation, but the reality is that there is technology available for that. It's been used in corporate private aviation etc. many decades already. It costs some money, it will cost something to install and operate, but it's not too expensive any more. The reasons why it isn't been used in commercial airliners is mainly it's just not been a requirement to install, there have not been accidents which would had it made a requirement and because airline operators are business trying to make money they avoid any extra costs they can.
There is a very good summary of the state of this in Science Friday May 30, 2014 story following previous Malesian Airlines plane case.
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The only way the Russian's can "win" this propaganda war is if they can somehow convince those Europeans who make decisions about sanctions that they had nothing to do with the downing of the passenger jet. People will want to know where that Buk missile launcher came from, who gave the order to shoot, and where that missile launcher is now. If there is any evidence that the Russians had any direct involvement with this, no amount of propaganda will help them outside of the regions where they have complete control of the media.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
It wouldn't matter in this case. We know where the plane is and what happened to it. The most you would see is a big acceleration or yaw as the missile detonated, might hear the explosion on the voice recorder, or whatever before it stops recording as the plane came apart. The US is reporting their military surveillance saw the missile radar light up as it tracked the plane.
There are now reports of monitored chatter among the separatists where they figured out it was civilian instead of military after the shoot down. There was also the tweet by the separatist general where he celebrated shooting down another Ukrainian plane and then deleted it. It really looks like it was the separatists who did it, using Russian weapons.
This shoot down and the loss of innocent life is the direct result of Vladimir Putin's reckless behavior and fomenting violence in the Ukraine as he injects weapons, advisors, and military to try to take the Ukraine over. This rests squarely on his shoulders. He might as well have killed those 290 people with his own hands.
The black box really won't provide anything not already known. What we need are radar tracking and satellite photos that show the position of the missile launcher before the missile was fired. That is the smoking gun needed to hang that communist megalomaniac bastard.