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Comment by erkkie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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