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Comment by Grue3 | Hacker News Reader

How improbable was two Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777-200ER flights crashing within five months? Should all Boeing 777-200ER airplanes be grounded? Or all Malaysian Airlines flights?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17

By the way it took years to figure out how exactly these crashed.

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-Quite different scenario. One was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile (And one can hardly fault Boeing for not providing ECM equipment as standard!), the other was (probably) wilfully flown into the great void.

Here, on the other hand, there are two eerily similar cases where the likely -mind, likely- common denominator is a new 'feature' which has been undercommunicated to the pilots flying the things.

MH 370's crew and passengers went hypoxic.

(edited from 17 to 370)

That's one theory. It's certainly not confirmed.

>And one can hardly fault Boeing for not providing ECM equipment as standard!

Maybe it should be, for planes flying near or over Russia...

One of the two planes was downed by a missile, and this was clear from the start. The only question was who was responsible for firing the missile.

Your argument is extremely forced.

MH nearly went bust due to these two failures.

The cause of MH17 was known immediately, and within two hours Ukraine had closed all routes in eastern Ukrainian airspace

all routes in whole UA airspace are closed I believe

It's some years on, and clearly all routes aren't closed - nor were they -- planes still flew into Kiev for example. Overflights too -- TUI are currently overflying western Ukraine on a Phuket-Stockholm routing. Airlines may have routed away from the entire of Ukraine but I don't believe there were any NOTAMs for western ukraine

Should we ground Russian surface to air rockets instead?

They tend to explode, crash and burn, so I'd say... yes? :)

According to this post and all the bonus that came out in the comments, they should've been grounded before the accidents: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19373216

That reasoning logic is the kind of strawman that we can expect from frequentists :)

Both crashes have been explained and it's bleeding obvious that they do not relate to the plane in itself.

Have they been expained within days of the crash? Last I heard the exact circumstances of 370's crash is still unknown. 17 took several years for the official report to come out.

In the case of MH17, there were strong indications it had been shot down within days at most, and once the Russian-backed rebels let investigators into the area, one found pieces of wreckage showing shrapnel damage. Hardly consistent with a defect in the airplane.

Official doings take time; if I went out in the street and killed someone in plain view of lots of witnesses, it would still take years for a final verdict to be passed in the courts - yet there would be no doubt as such as to what had happened.

In fact, potentially for political reasons, an intercepted communication between Russian rebels in Ukraine and Russia based military was released within hours of the crash on youtube

It was released so quickly that some even thought it was Western propoganda, but all evidence points to the plane being shot down by a BUK

Yeah the exact circumstances are not known but it was clear after a couple of days that MH370 did not fly its designated flight plan and instead flew a different path and actively avoided detection.

The plane was shot down on July 17th 2014. The day after several reputable Dutch newspapers (MH17 was a Dutch/Malaysian code share) already reported strong suspicions of the plane having been shot down.

One day.

Of course the official report took longer, but there was never any suspicion of technical failure (except on Russia Today).

It was obvious on the same day, as Russian media touted the video of falling airliner debris (which they thought was a Ukrainian military cargo plane).

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