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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

(Edit: We don't know what caused this incident. Speculation follows. It's best to not form conclusions until the experts examine the evidence.)

It looks like it was shot down with an air defense missile. You can see the plane on fire as it falls to the earth.

Video taken during the crash, the plane is clearly engulfed in flames:

https://mobile.twitter.com/isna_farsi/status/121475622529397...

Video of the aftermath / wreckage:

https://twitter.com/Looper_i/status/1214772061580615681

https://twitter.com/Looper_i/status/1214773020885041152

It might have been mistakenly triggered as part of Iran's anti-aircraft missile defense or a similar system. The plane probably wasn't safely diverted from an active war zone, and Iran is already in a heightened state of watchful defense.

Similar incidents:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 (TIL; caused by the USA)

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

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> It looks like it was shot down with an air defense missile. You can see the plane on fire as it falls to the earth.

Come on. Don't do this.

Planes are complex machines. They're pressurized and propelled by a continuous explosion. There are lots of ways for things to go wrong.

A good rule of thumb in aviation is to ignore the first 24 hours of news. There are no facts. Everyone is an armchair crash investigator. And mindshare is competed for with salaciousness.

It could be an attack. It could be an air-defense error. Or it could be a mechanical error. One of countless possible mechanical errors. Either way, it's a tragedy to which no service is done by baseless speculation.

what is the point of this being the top post on HN then if there’s no point to speculation? What are people supposed to be commenting for, really?

> What are people supposed to be commenting for, really?

I don't know. And I don't have to know.

Just because one can't come up with a value-adding comment doesn't require the content be censored. Nor does it mean the void should be filled with nonsense.

comments shouldn’t be censored because you’re personally allergic to speculation

This comment didn’t age well

Yes it did. It was basically just "don't jump to conclusions", which is the correct way to approach any of these kinds of events.

Then we should just close this thread since literally everything will be speculation at this point.

> I don't see the problem with speculation

It's intellectually dishonest, particularly when baseless speculation is framed by an "it looks like."

It crowds out fact-driven discussion.

It's disrespectful and potentially hurtful.

It could be mistaken for informed commentary, in which case it's misleading. (When I’ve done it, the first victim is myself.)

And to top it off, it's useless. Totally useless. Nobody walks away with a deeper understanding. No new perspectives. Just screaming into a void.

You stop because what you are doing is typing a lot of words without saying anything useful. You’re being a bully.

Observations are useful. Even mistaken ones.

Saying "It looks like..." is stating a fact. What else is someone supposed to say if that’s what it looks like to them?

It doesn't crowd out "fact-driven discussion".

It's not disrespectful or potentially harmful.

Anything could be mistaken, even empirical evidence. Even what you think is a fact...can be wrong.

> And to top it off, it's useless. Totally useless. Nobody walks away with a deeper understanding. No new perspectives. Just screaming into a void.

That's you. You're being ridiculous. You're over-reacting. You haven't produced any evidence to backup your opinion that speculation is harmful or crowds out your so-called "fact-driven" discussion, or that what is said here on HN has any effect whatsoever on anything going on with this story. Just stop it.

I appreciate this. I've modified my post.

The Ukrainian embassy reported preliminary information indicates engine failure, and excludes a rocket or terrorist attack as cause. [1]

Particularly at this time, I wouldn't trust random sources on the web to provide accurate information about events.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/iran-plane-cras...

The embassy has withdrawn their initial statement [1].

[1] (Ukrainian) https://nv.ua/ukr/ukraine/politics/aviakatastrofa-v-tegerani...

How much can you trust government agencies in times like these? With so many competing intelligence agencies, quite possibly sitting on the brink of WWIII, I don't think it's outlandish for an official source to lie, intentionally or not.

The amount of trust put into any conclusion at this point should be minimal, and whilst I understand and partly share the lack of trust in embassy statements, I posted this to counter the blind "looks like it was shot down, someone on twitter said so" conclusion.

They might not even be lying: would it be classified as a "terrorist attack" if it's a mistake by the Iranians? A "rocket attack" wouldn't hit an airplane, you need guided missiles for that.

Then why even talk about anything at that point if you were not there yourself.

I see it's too immature to conduct an engine failure in this situation without investigation report.

That's probably why they said "preliminary information indicates". And the rumors of a missile was probably the reason why they felt the need of putting out a statement in the first place.

Unverified video

There’s a lot of disinformation going on online. We saw this in the recent UK election, there are many players wanting to spread lies.

I just hope our reputable journalists are up to the job.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/janelytvynenko/false-an...

> Unverified video

Well, checkout other videos of the twitter user for more.

You mean the reputable journalists at BuzzFeed?

Apparently they’ve evolved quite a bit: https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/chris-hamby-buzzfeed-news

BuzzFeed is quite different from BuzzFeedNews which produces higher quality content. Very unfortunate naming and we go through that exchange on hn every time they get linked.

As we should. Reputation is the best tool we have for tracking credibility throughout society. As a pioneer of clickbait garbage, Buzzfeed has a deservedly poor reputation, and a little bit of brand diversification doesn’t change that. If the Sackler family started opening rehab clinics, it wouldn’t change my opinion on what a bunch of scumbags they are.

No, the reputable journalists at BuzzFeed News, which has produced two Pulitzer Prize finalists so far.

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

BuzzFeed News is not BuzzFeed. They've won several well-deserved journalistic awards.

That's also what an engine fire / turbine stall looks like. However, a 737 is able to climb on one engine so there was absolutely more wrong than "just" en engine failure/fire.

Hard to be conclusive with that video. Iran's own state media says the engine was on fire. Not necessarily contradicted by the video. https://en.irna.ir/news/83625750/147-Iranians-32-foreigners-...

A fire in the engine is not enough to turn a 737 into a huge burning fireball that crashes within 20 seconds.

Regarding the missile theory: if it was a missle, it was probably accidential. The majority of passengers on board were Iranian citizens.

> Regarding the missile theory: if it was a missle, it was probably accidential. The majority of passengers on board were Iranian citizens.

Unless it was a non-Iranian missile, or a rogue actor.

(At this point, it's all speculation)

Unless the engine blades detaching ripped apart something critical, as happened several times on different aircraft, and crucially, twice on exactly this model with this engine from similar manufactuer time.

Remember Stuxnet?

Pretty sure russian/chinese SAMs don’t run windows

What makes you pretty sure of that?

* Most of them were made before it was even a thing

* Precisely for reason above

> turn a 737 into a huge burning fireball

From a suggested twitter video. No affirmative source yet.

Don't you think it should take them at least a few days to determine a preliminary cause of the crash?

The Ukranian embassy in Tehran already have a statement on their website saying it's an engine malfunction and are ruling out a terrorist/rocket attack (reported by CNN and NYT).

Right, but the question is whether that's a reasonable conclusion for them to have made already.

The pilots of the plane would be in constant contact with the nearest airport during and right after take-off, especially when there are technical problems.

It's not hard to imagine the conversation would involve like:-

PILOT: One of the engines has failed catastrophically, we need to make an emergency landing, can you clear the runway back in Tehran or is there another airport we can go to?

But such a statement wouldn't rule out anything. Catastrophic engine failures can be caused by missiles.

It would take everyone a few days to determine the cause, especially the people spreading unverified informations such as 'it was shot down by a missile'

It wouldn't take very long for the relevant parties to know whether they accidentally shot a missile at a 737. For a mechanical issue, there would be much more uncertainty (although it's possible the pilot reported the issue to ATC).

And even then, "ATC, we have a catastrophic engine failure" from the pilots doesn't discount that the catastrophic engine failure was caused by a missile. The pilots don't magically get to know what caused the engine to blow up.

An independent investigation is impossible in the current environment. You either choose to believe Iran or not.

Pilot should be able to communicate even if engine is on fire (especially then). Transponder doesn't suddenly stop working if your engine erupts in flames.

Aviate, navigate, communicate.

They would have been rather occupied with the first two.

Good point. I concede. I'd still expect them to declare an emergency but it's possible that the event was so catastrophic they didn't find the time.

Its even fairly common, one guys is reading checklists and the other is, you know, flying the airplane.

To be fair, communication is different from ADS-B transmissions, which end abruptly at the flight's maximum speed and altitude: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/ps752#23732569

This is all speculation at this point. Let's hope we find the definite cause as some point.

More important than finding out the cause is ensuring we don’t find out the wrong cause.

We’ll likely never know MH370s cause. That’s annoying, and heartbreaking Dott those affected. In itself it doesn’t lead to tens of thousands of more deaths.

Edit: Never mind! I commented about a tweet that suggested the fireball was maybe a missle but it looks like people who know better agree that's not the case

No way that's true. Missiles are generally pretty small. That fire in the air was BIG, and was lit in the way that a fireball is, not the way that a missile burns.

Also, missiles travel incredibly fast, way faster than that fireball is going.

Interesting idea but I don't think it's true. Unless I am missing something, the "plane dot" is at or almost at horizon level. After the explosion you can see that at the position of the "dot" is something that looks like a building or a tower. Light from that could be the dot that we saw.

Another thing is that the "fireball" seems to be losing parts, I'm not sure if missile trails leave puffs of flames behind, but this one looks like it did. Having flaming pieces fall off from a plane would look like that.

Agree. Rockets are quicker and with more compact engines, not flaming fireballs. The parts falling from the fireball could be the result of an engine fire caused by structural failure of the engine or collision with something (such as a bird strike, although I think that is less likely as it's nighttime).

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