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Comment by romanovcode | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand how can pilot be so reckless to fly over known warzone?

Hey I'm not saying it's their own fault, but please stop telling me that it's "safe" because it's not. It was a known warzone.

Todays example:

Virgin Atlantic, Air France and Emirates will no longer allow its planes to fly over Iraq due to concerns about the dangers posed by Islamic militants.

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You need state sponsored military equipment to shoot down a 10km high flying airplane. You can't do this with your homebuilt rocket launcher.

Up to this incident nobody was thinking that a state could be reckless enough to target civilian planes. Or lend their military equipment to people reckless enough. This has changed since then.

old news:

Iran Air was shot down by US Navy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Are you for real? There's war zones all over the world, usually that doesn't mean shooting down a passenger flight 10km high, for which you need specialized equipment, not just a random shoulder carry rocket. Until the incident, airspace at civilian cruising altitudes was free and open in Ukraine. Hint: space is 3d, lower levels were closed in various places.

On July 14th 2014, just three days before the MH17 incident, an Antonov AN-26 Ukrainian military transport plane was hit at 21 000 feet altitude, so there was a strong indication that SAMs were available to the seperatists. According to the Dutch Safety Board, the airspace should have been closed [1].

[1] http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/dutch-safety-board-u...

Thanks for the link, hit at 21000 feet just earlier does change the risk profile, but then again, it's hard for the Safety Board to come to any other conclusion post the facts.

AN-26 was hit with a MANPADS which cannot target altitude at which civilian airliners fly. No one at the time thought that Russia was crazy enough to supply the rebels with BUKs.

While the previous aircraft were downed by MANPADS or AA, the AN-26 in question was flying at an altitude only reachable by a SAM. At the bottom of this article [1] is a good overview of the shot-down aircraft over east Ukraine in 2014.

[1] http://airheadsfly.com/2014/07/15/ukraine-latest-an-26-downi...

Hundreds of other planes did too, because no authority tracked by airlines reported the area as an active conflict zone --- moreover, among the world's conflict zones, there aren't many in which an airliner flying at altitude would be at risked. The unique situation here is that Russia had deployed extremely sophisticated surface-to-air batteries.

> The unique situation here is that Russia had deployed extremely sophisticated surface-to-air batteries.

Single launcher. Full battery has 4 launchers and a significantly more sophisticated radar. Arguably that radar would have helped to sort between Ukrainian observation plane and civilian Boeing.

And a bunch of other airlines are not diverting from Iraq because they disagree about the danger.

At the time of the MH17 shootdown, some airlines were already diverting around eastern Ukraine, and many others were not.

A reasonable assessment of the danger was made, and they decided that it was safe enough to continue flying there. That assessment turned out to be wrong, but that doesn't mean the it was "reckless."

What was the weather situation over this region on that day?

I have no idea. Why do you ask?

Everything is a calculated risk. Your question is equivalent to asking a crashed driver how they could have been so reckless to drive that day.

In hindsight, we tend to fall into the trap that the actual outcome was the correct/fated outcome. That we should have predicted it and known better.

A weather forecast that posted a 5% chance of rain on a sunny day is not wrong. No matter if it rains or is sunny, the probability was still just 5%, but we often assume that if the forecast was "correct" it should be 0% or 100%. That's not how it works. A coin toss is always 50%, even after the fact.

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