Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers | Hacker News Reader

Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers

wsj.com

585 pointsJumpCrisscross431 comments

BTW, this is (also) why the occasional Russian missile successfully penetrates the eastern flank of Europe. The damage potential of switching your entire air defense setup to a more aggressive posture will eventually result in civilian casualties. This happens everywhere, just the other day an American F-18 was shot down by an American destroyer in the Red Sea, and an F-18 carries additional deconfliction equipment that an airliner doesn't have. As of today Europe is still using the peacetime kosher method of "we need to intercept it with a combat jet, have a look, ask the president, then maybe shoot it down".

It's also the reason the US (last I checked*) has standing orders not to attempt to down the drones of unknown origin (adversary espionage, I guess) that swarm at military bases. The risk of accidentally attacking a civilian aircraft vastly outweighs—what they assess as—the immediate threat of the drones.

When there was a panic about the Chinese spy balloon last year, the US sent armed F-22's to shoot down... at least three different unmanned civilian balloons [0,1].

edit: I think I was wrong; apparently the US has a new "deadly force" order as of last week [2].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824653 ("Hobby Club’s Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down by USAF (aviationweek.com)") 371 comments

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34814717 ("The US Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico balloon over Canada (rtl-sdr.com)", 168 comments

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/us-temporarily-b... ("US temporarily bans drones in parts of NJ, may use “deadly force” against aircraft")

No, I think you're right.

I'm quite sure the "deadly force" wording was for effect, more than any kind of actual change in posture or practice. Unless I'm mistaken there are still plenty of drones being seen in NJ and they're not blasting them out of the sky. And they've always had the option of lethal force around bases anyway.

    what they assess as—the immediate threat of the drones

None of us know for sure but I think the immediate threat of the drones is negligible. If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes. And as far as the visible spectrum is concerned all the major players have satellites overhead anyway.

And as you say, the risks of shooting drones down are high. Damage to nearby property. Accidental shootdowns of innocent craft. Successful shootdowns would reveal our capabilities. Unsuccessful shootdowns would reveal our inability to deal with the threat. And in aggregate this would all give the enemy lots of intel as to where we do and don't have defenses. And open war (!!!) over our skies is, to put it mildly, kind of a big deal. There are, to put it mildly, global economic consequences.

Of course, that's all if these drones are of hostile origin, which I think is still a very open question.

If these drones are "ours," which would be weird but also plausible, then the "deadly force" note in the FAA notice could just be part of the cover story.

> If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes

Not really. Some signals can be very much unidirectional (eg, visible only to an overhead drone) instead of omnidirectional (eg, a car).

Just curious; what kind of signals would be uni-directionally beaming upwards? For communicating with aircrafts that directly hover above the base? Wouldn't that be really limiting in terms of usefulness?

Satellites.

Satellite base stations

I'm surprised the US doesn't carry bigger drones with butterfly nets.

But those drones would have to wear the same uniforms as the Keystone Cops to put it to full effect.

They could send Spiderman Drones with web slingers!

https://www.fun.com/marvel-3-inch-spider-man-flying-figure-i...

In the US there are also major restrictions to federal US military operating on US soil. [0]

Thus, any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal.

Given the mobility of drones and desire to prevent their encroachment on bases in the first place, the appropriately legal unit for this would be non-federalized national guard air defense units, tasked by the state governor to intervene.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

The Posse Comitatus Act restricts the military from engaging in civil law enforcement. It doesn’t prevent the military from using force to defend US soil or airspace. For instance, on 9/11, fighter jets were scrambled to intercept Flight 93; they just didn’t reach it until the passengers had already forced the plane down.

The 9/11 military airspace defense mission was a mass of confusion, as a consequence of the then-novelty of civilian airliner suicide hijackings and split information between the FAA and NORAD.

Hypothetically, the fighters launched could have shot down a civilian plane, but it would have taken direct presidential authorization (i.e. national emergency).

In the absence of an immediate threat, that authorization isn't going to happen.

Drones in most cases are a civil law enforcement matter.

They're not obviously the actors of a foreign nation state, are not an invasion, and are not posing an immediate threat.

They are breaking civil aviation laws.

You're still vastly overstating the scope of the Posse Comitatus Act. As a matter of policy, the US military is cautious about intercepting hostile aircraft in American airspace[1], but the Posse Comitatus Act doesn't prevent it from doing so.

In particular, your claim that "any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal" is not only false but facially absurd, since it would imply that the US military is statutorily prevented from intercepting enemy bombers or responding to an invasion of American soil.

[1] The reasons for which are well discussed here: https://www.navalgazing.net/Thoughts-on-the-Chinese-Balloon

Drones can capture much higher resolution images, and from very different angles, than satellites. Both are useful, and neither really replaces the other. A high-res composite image taken from multiple angles and exposures can confirm or refute what was just a hunch from satellite imagery alone.

> None of us know for sure but I think the immediate threat of the drones is negligible. If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby homes. And as far as the visible spectrum is concerned all the major players have satellites overhead anyway.

You can also do radio frequency signals intercepts from space, too. You need a big antenna on your satellite, but it's essentially a solved problem. Spaceborne SIGINT goes back to at least the early 70s.

The problem with satellites however is that they cannot loiter, so the window in which they can gather data is limited and predictable. They are also essentially fixed on their track - changing orbit requires fuel. Drones (and old-fashioned spy planes) do not suffer from that limitation.

Tossing a battery-powered radio in a gallon ziplock into the woods outside the chainlink for the base also works, and would have more loitering capability than a drone.

Clearly. But it would not be overhead and might suffer from shielding by buildings etc.

So throw it in a gallon ziplock inside some rope and stuff and toss into a tree. In any case, a drone has about 15-30 min of loitering time while a radio-in-a-bag has potentially weeks or even months. I know which I would choose for spying on radio transmissions.

There are geostationary satellites. they loiter.

What they don’t have is high accuracy pointing. If you want to listen to activity on 128MHz at a specific military base from GEO you’re going to be getting a huge amount of interference from everything else in CONUS on the same frequency. At LEO you can do much much better pointing with your antenna.

Geostationary is only possible on very specific orbits - over the equator on one height. Any other orbit cannot be geostationary.

It's not 'for effect'. It's the legal description of use of a firearm by police/military.

The "drone threat" is a bunch of mass hysteria. Every photo I was shown was obviously a passenger jet liner.

   It's not 'for effect'. It's the legal description of 
   use of a firearm by police/military.

That's what I meant by "for effect." They were already able to shoot you.

Ergo a reminder that the military or police can shoot you is for effect; it does not represent a change to the status quo.

Drones are dangerous. First, they can take high-quality photos, second they can jam the radio communications and GPS, third, they may contain explosives.

> Unless I'm mistaken there are still plenty of drones being seen in NJ and they're not blasting them out of the sky.

Would these drones be running FAA-standard navigation lights and a transponder? Because that seems to be the case for most of these drone spottings :)

I know what you're saying! Clearly the vast majority of these drone sightings seem to be regular aircraft.

Some do not seem to be, although my skepticism is high because I have seen a lot of faked UFO videos over the years and faking points of light in the night sky is like, the easiest thing to fake in a fake video/photo.

While I think this is unlikely, we could imagine that whoever is doing shady drone stuff might want to actually observe some basic safety rules, ridiculous as that sounds.

Suppose for a second that these drones are a "flex" from China/Russia/whoever. Causing a midair collision with an aircraft because they're running dark, or risking the chance of that because they're running dark, is a lot more serious than just flying some drones.

And if it's aliens, hey, maybe they're just trying to... uh, fit in by mimicing our airplanes' safety lights? =)

What adversarial intelligence would fly drones at night extremely low with their lights on?

IMO most likely commercial LIDAR mapping by some company that’d rather remain stealth.

None and in most cases it’s not even clear it’s happening. Due to perspective, a plane far away and a drone up close could look very similar at night when all you can see are lights in a dark sky.

Totally, it at least seems quite clear it's not happening anywhere near the extent to which it's suspected of happening.

Drones fly around. It's legal. It's fun. It's interesting for countless reasons to countless people. Really speaks to the state of our information environment that so many have been thrown into an absolute tizzy.

Most people just don’t know much about drones or planes really. They don’t know how their brain interprets what it sees. Etc

It’s obviously just mass hysteria.

This would make a fascinating case study about how many people have never looked up at their own skies before. I also wouldn't be surprised if the hysteria is being amplified to distract from all the other nonsense in the world right now.

A star light-years away also looks the same, and it's pretty hilarious when they're mistaken for "drones"

Pretty much any object in featureless space: ships on a flat body of water (sea, lake), aircraft in the sky, objects on flat terrain (plains, taiga, desert, sand, snow), objects in space.

Even on other solar system bodies (the Moon, Mars, etc.), it's quite difficult to gauge scale and distance without terrestrial references (trees, structures, etc.) to guide the eye.

Sadly when the United States Coast Guard reports being followed by unknown drones (and unknown drones have been reported around military space by military personnel for years) and the government response is to say 'we don't know, and we are doing nothing' people tend to become concerned. The best way to stop vigilanties is to have a system of laws and and government that follows the laws and that instill trust in the people. When the government just shrugs, well... that's how you end up with horrible/idiotic vigilanytism.

I'm a government institutions guy, but yes, let's attack people for... following basic human nature, not the government big brains that ignore basic realities of human nature about needing trust in stable/steady government institutions who instead just demand 'faith in government' that isn't earned. The government isn't just failing in actions, they are failing in understanding this BASIC requirement for governing.

So... outlaw drones? Or are you proposing we just start shooting people's toys out of the sky? At what cost per drone is justifiable to achieve this? A couple hundred thousand dollars and risk of misfires, aviation accidents, and shrapnel?

I think the people panicking about drones are not going to be a fan of a federal ban on them. Just my two cents though.

I'm not proposing anything. I'm just pointing out when the government fails to lead/leaves a vacuum people can quickly turn to vigilantist/dumb type behavior and follow the first person/thought/idea that fills the void.

Here the government said 'the United States Coast Guard mistook some 747s far away for 12 drones following their boat and if it wasn't planes then actually we assessed the 12 drones and found they aren't a threat, we don't know what they are, whose they are, or were they came from' and expected people to just go, hmm, ok, nevermind then.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Government is there to help control/direct what it gets filled with when it's a societal one.

Yeah totally... we want the government to be at the ready with some answer for literally any event that confuses any moron with a Twitter account lest it blow up into many morons with Twitter accounts getting confused.

The government doesn't know, it has no real responsibility or right to know, and it says it doesn't know. People extrapolating that into ridiculous theories cannot really be pinned on the government.

Next up: "I saw a shadow in the woods near my house and the government said they have no clue what it is!!!!"

You, an allegedly levelheaded person: "Well nature abhors a vacuum! It's a failure to lead not to have answers to such questions!"

No, that's actually not a levelheaded take.

You might not like the take, but all I am doing is pointing out human nature and a basic role government provides.

If you don't enforce laws/proper behavior/provide safety, you get vigilanties. If you don't provide answers, people go looking, and gullible people settle for the first thing they find.

No one is confused about why these people are panicking. They’re panicking because they’ve offloaded their thinking and information processing to algorithmic bullshit-amplification machines.

That’s why I’m being aggressive against this same “errr well yah know the government should have answers!” bullshit you’re purveying right here.

That’s what they want you to think. The sailors on the Iranian aircraft carrier and the Bigfoot pay close attention to FAA regulations.

"It's also the reason the US (last I checked*) has standing orders not to attempt to down the drones of unknown origin"

I think it depends. The smaller drones are allowed to be zapped using equiptment designed to take down drowns. They generally aren't shooting traditional munitions at drones domestically for multiple safety reasons, unless they are over a specific size/altitude.

The government has no right to destroy property (by any method) of private citizens who are flying drones when there is no evidence of illegality or of them being a credible threat.

To say "flying a drone makes it a credible threat" to say "drones are illegal," which someone is free to take up as their legislative priority.

If you're flying your drone in a restricted area, then it would be illegal. Many of the drone-downing systems do not permanently destroy it.

On a side note, do you have a TRUST or Part 107?

Yeah, duh if it's in a restricted area. That's not what the drone hysteria is about.

> Many of the drone-downing systems do not permanently destroy it.

Uhh yeah if a consumer grade drone falls 300 feet out of the sky then yes it's destroyed.

"Yeah, duh if it's in a restricted area. That's not what the drone hysteria is about."

Look up TFRs. Look up all the other restrictions these drones are supposed to be following. Tell me how they're legal.

"Uhh yeah if a consumer grade drone falls 300 feet out of the sky then yes it's destroyed."

Not irreparably. Some components will.

First TFRs in NJ went up on Dec 18... and suuspiiciousslyyy.... drone sightings disappear!

https://nypost.com/2024/12/28/us-news/mystery-nj-drone-sight...

> Not irreparably. Some components will.

Okay.

Lol what are you even arguing right now? It is not legal for the USG to destroy, seize, or damage people's property when they are not breaking the law or credibly threatening people. At the times of the drone sightings, there was no evidence whatsoever of them breaking the law or credibly threatening people.

Please state your position explicitly instead of this silly dance.

Important to note that it was a panic about an alleged chinese spy balloon, but in all likelihood it was just a weather balloon. There was no proof it was a spy balloon.

Ummm, no. We recovered the balloons and they were full of surveillance equipment.

They seemed to not have a way to phone home, so more than likely China’s plan was to recover the balloon to get the data. That may be what you recall. For all we know they had been doing so for years successfully.

But they were definitely spy balloons.

The US downed and recovered a Chinese balloon, not balloons.

The 2023 incident is pretty well written up on Wikipedia[1].

There was one Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down. Subsequent shoot-downs of balloons over the arctic and Great Lakes were not attributed to China - one that was recovered was definitively identified as a private weather balloon.

There were also previous Chinese surveillance balloon overflights - as well as one over Central America - that were not shot down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident

> in all likelihood it was just a weather balloon

Normal weather balloons are 20ft in diameter. This one was 200 feet in diameter and carried quite a payload - about the size of a couple of box cars. Additionally it had propellers and the ability to steer itself.

> There was no proof it was a spy balloon.

There was a preponderance of evidence - from the route of the balloon (over US strategic nuclear missle silos), to the equipment that was recovered to radio intercptions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident

This is also why there was reluctance to shoot the balloon down until it had passed over the ocean. The enormous payload container was a definite threat to life and limb if shot down over a populated area, and most of the US has at least a token population.

It’s also much easier to do less damage on the drone itself by shooting it over water than land. Honestly I think that played a major factor where they shot it down.

A lot of this stuff is “doing something” to calm people down. People are losing their minds.

Where I live in upstate NY, Nextdoor.com was losing its shit over a “drone”, actually a lidar mapping plane, and some of the dumber people were suggesting taking shots at the Iranians.

I’m waiting for the next seemingly inevitable object lesson: it’s insanely illegal, federally illegal, to shoot at flying objects, for what I would have hoped were obvious reasons. But it seems we’re still really rather dumb as a collective.

> obvious reasons

It's maybe worth mentioning that the obvious reasons almost entirely have to do with the things you'd hit in the air, not once the bullet descended. If everyone on earth suddenly shot upward at around 80 degrees from the ground, you'd expect approximately zero casualties on average from the bullets falling and lethally striking surface objects (there would be a number of welts and bruises as well as minor property damage, but even that is less likely than you might suspect).

People are routinely killed by falling bullets. It turns out that the vast majority of idiots firing blindly into the air don't know or care to shoot only straight up, and it would be the same problem for whichever idiots were trying to shoot down drones.

> People are routinely killed by falling bullets.

Do you have a citation for that? I can't find any numbers on people getting hit by falling bullets, let alone fatalities. Things let celebratory gunfire don't seem to be comparable since people tend to congregate outside for celebrations resulting in larger groups of potential unintentional targets.

Here you go:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201323

Celebratory gunfire incidents were included, but only make up 4.6% of the total.

In approximately one year:

>Altogether, 317 persons received stray bullet injuries;

>142 (44.8%) were female, and 176 (55.5%) were outside the age range 15 to 34 years.

>Most individuals (258, 81.4%) were unaware of the events leading to the gunfire that caused their injuries.

>Many (129, 40.7%) were at home; most of these persons (88, 68.2%) were indoors.

>Sixty-five persons (20.5%) died, 18 (27.7%) of them at the shooting site and 55 (84.6%) on the day they were shot.

>Fourteen persons received nonfatal injuries by secondary mechanisms.

I have not logged the citations, but I distinctly recall reading on the order of one-two news reports per year of people being killed by falling bullets in multiple different countries, including US, Brazil, and several middle eastern countries.

Also, injuries and one fatality were confirmed by Mythbusters in [0]. Read the account for Episode 50, which was the only myth to receive all three ratings (Busted, Plausible, and Confirmed) at the same time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2006_season)

Some data on stray bullet fatalities just in Rio:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1284427/stray-bullets-vi...

I'm not sure that's at all the same thing with the extremely high rate of violent crime involving guns in Brazil. Pointing a gun straight at a city background, missing your specific target, and still injuring/killing somebody is very different from pointing a gun at the sky and having the 170 ft/s bullet fall, manage to hit that same highly populated region, and cause problems.

The point is that all sky-pointed bullets are NOT going only 170ft/sec.

Yes, it is reasonably established that bullets fired straight up do not regain their initial velocity on the way back down.

But, at less-than-vertical firing angles, they can retain a lot of their initial 4-figure-fps velocity, and how much is very dependent on particular trajectory, wind, bullet composition, and initial angle. Dependent enough that it's specifically outlawed in many states.

So, don't go glibly firing off skyward celebratory shots (over)confident in your understanding of the physics (or implicitly advocating it). You might be willing to take the risk, but no one else is willingly undertaking the risk you are creating.

I honestly can't believe that people would argue that they should be allowed to fire guns up in the air, lmao. You & I both know people don't indicate while driving, so I'm sure we're not that surprised, though.

No, I agree. Brazil is likely leaning towards immediate contact and absorption of small arms in that localized region of conflict rather than horizon aimed rifle fire like you’d expect with people shooting at traditional aircraft they believe is as close as a drone would be, towards what I presume would be a residential, no-fly zone, military airspace, etc.

It’s really not the collective. It’s every town and cities loonies that now have formed a small but vocal subset of the population thanks to the Internet.

I think a solid 95% of what people think are drones are actually passenger planes so I’m glad we’re not firing at them.

There’s no “identify friend or foe” excuse for shooting down an airliner beyond human error.

A missle travels at tremendous speeds and require automated defence systems to neutralize the target at a safe explosion distance in the sky, which often does not afford humans to make “phone calls” and “meetings” and “discussion” to down the threat, before it potentially blasts a population centre or a military installation with thousands of soldiers and civilians at the base.

Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and not downing it, But rather a risk between downing an missile that can “potentially” be an airliner that god knows why is in a restricted airspace, and letting it fly and risk getting killed those thousands or even millions of people (if a population centre/city) get exploded with bombs and missiles.

> Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and not downing it, But rather a risk between downing an missile that can “potentially” be an airliner that god knows why is in a restricted airspace, and letting it fly and risk getting killed those thousands or even millions of people (if a population centre/city) get exploded with bombs and missiles.

With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?

At a glance, just looking at the trajectory of this UFO for half a minute would be enough to determine if it's an airline with stable flight path, VS a missile that has some sort of trajectory that doesn't look at all like a airline. Not to mention the radar signature has to be different in at least some ways.

But again, I don't know the capability or process of the Russian military, in a high-tension environment sometimes shit just goes wrong even though it shouldn't.

> With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian military is, could they really be so far behind that they're unable to determine the difference between an commercial airlines and a high-speed missile

If they exclude radar signature of commercial airliners, and let them fly, it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.

There is a reason why a lot of military and sci-fi movies have the phrase “aircraft with radar signature of a bird” , anything that the military excludes or allows to pass off, just becomes the cloning target of missile makers under the tag of “camouflage”.

> ... it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.

Well, the problem with that is that airliners are (relatively speaking) slow as fuck. A "high-speed missile" with the radar cross section of an airliner would be mind-meltingly obvious as a threat even to automated defense robots.

Iran mistook PS752 for a cruise missile [0]. It's not an impossible mistake; a cruise missile is (often) a subsonic, jet-powered object.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airlines...

Point of order: A cruise missile isn't a high-speed missile. It's (almost?) always a big, slow, lumbering bastard, as far as missiles go.

There are cruise missiles powered by ramjets that go significantly supersonic, but for the most part ballistic missiles are easier to use, longer range, and harder to intercept. The prospect of anti-air systems effective enough to pose ballistic missiles trouble in a "near-peer" non-nuclear conflict is recent. Both maneuvering-capable ramjet/scramjet cruise missiles and (the significantly easier) maneuverable hypersonic re-entry vehicles that launch ballistically, are the subject of recently fielded early models, active development & active testing because of that prospect.

Hence the term "cruise", which in every other context means not traveling especially fast.

Airliners aren't slow by cruise missiles standards: supersonic cruise missiles are few and far between, and most cruise missiles in fact fly roughly at the speed of an airliner (between 800 and 1000km/h).

You're the second person to talk about cruise missiles in this subthread.

The comment I replied to (and quoted in my reply) talked specifically about "high-speed missiles". Nearly all cruise missiles are most emphatically NOT that sort of missile.

Stealth airplanes might have the radar cross section of a bird but they don't have the same flight characteristics (altitude, speed.) If you can manage to see it, you won't confuse it for a bird.

put another way, your average seagull ain't cruising at 10000 feet @ 600 mph

A flock of migratory birds could very easily be cruising at that height, and if in a fast moving jetstream or similar could be moving at hundreds of miles an hour when referenced to a ground based source.

That came as news to me. Some fly at 11200m/37,000 feet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_heig...

If you've ever dropped a French fry at the beach, you know that's not true.

> it will just make weapon makers start designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner lol.

The weapons industry isn't that enthusiastic about blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions. There would be massive diplomatic costs to making, selling, buying or firing missiles with fake civilian transponders.

When I look at current conflicts, I’m not sure that the Geneva convention features anywhere in anyone’s thought processes.

You are describing a war crime.

Ukraine uses (among other things) fixed-wing drones with similar characteristics to civilian aircraft. Some of them are *actual* civilian aircraft, retrofitted into unmanned suicide drones,

https://www.flightglobal.com/military-uavs/ukraine-appears-t... ("Ukraine appears to deploy modified A-22 ultralights as suicide UAVs")

Unmanned kamikazes?

They are just DIY cruise missiles really.

None of them remotely resemble an E190 though, which is about 50x the size of a cruise missile, communicates effectively with air traffic control and broadcasts ADS-B signals telling you what it is (at least when you're not jamming it...)

Radar doesn't exactly tell you the size of of a contact. Sure, you can measure the power of the return signal, correct for distance and get something that loosely correlates with size. But it correlates much more strongly with other things.

You're also making the assumption here that it was a modern Russian system. This wasn't exactly close to the current fighting, its entirely possible this radar was manufactured in the Soviet Union. I don't think those receive a lot (or any) civilian broadcasts.

> You're also making the assumption here that it was a modern Russian system

People do like to provide their very important opinion completely oblivious what Grozny is farther away from eg Crimea than Kiev.

Since Russia reduced Grozny to rubble relatively recently, it's probably not that old.

Most A2A systems has wheels (or floats) and can thus easily be relocated. While it probably had good stuff once, I think all the high end equipment once located here has moved closer to Ukraine by now. What's left is probably the worst (human or technological) that's left.

> Ukraine uses (among other things) fixed-wing drones with similar characteristics to civilian aircraft.

Including taking off from commercial airports on publicly available schedules, on predetermined airways/corridors, and broadcasting 1080 MHZ ADS-B data?

> Some of them are actual civilian aircraft, retrofitted into unmanned suicide drones

literally small prop planes with guidance systems and instead of ~4 passengers it's lots of explosives. commonly used against Russian oil depots, etc.

small radar signature, and a lot of ambiguity with civilian aircraft.

Confusion with civilian prop aircraft, not commercial jet airliners flying at vastly higher altitude and speeds.

An E190 on approach (remember, this airplane was trying to land at Grozny) has an approach speed between 125-145 knots (depending on load). A Cessna 172 for example has a cruise speed of ~120 knots and can cruise up to 10k feet. A typical instrument landing glide path is 3 degrees - that intercepts 10k feet at ~60km out.

The likelihood of confusing a regional jet with a small prop plane (purely based on speed/heading/altitude) is way higher during landing.

While it crashed near an airport it doesn’t seem like the aircraft was targeted at low altitude and low speeds.

This aircraft was trying to land so it likely had much lower altitude and speed than usual.

It doesn’t appear that the aircraft was attacked on final approach. Instead flying much higher and faster than prop drones.

Wait a minute. I thought they hit some angry birds?

All of these decisions are made by soldiers. Russian air defense troops are no doubt overworked, poorly treated, under intense pressure and probably motivated by avoiding going to the front.

Chances are, an operator or officer made a bad call. They are cogs in a killing machine.

I would have thought the aircraft’s transponder would have been the first clue. I can identify nearly every aircraft over my house right now using a $30 USB dongle, including callsign, airline, flight number, altitude, speed, and bearing.

It depends a lot on the context (weather, altitude) and equipment (Russia has a lot of equipment, some of it new, some of it old, some of it ancient).

Without minimizing the personal contribution to this disaster of every serviceman, IMHO the blame, first and foremost, rests firmly with whoever the bloody hell decided to keep the airspace open nearly three years into a war. Civilian airspace is open above Chechnya and Dagestan while the VKS is lobing missiles from/from above the Caspian Sea, and planes are landing at Sochi while Novorossiysk gets hit by drones. This is nuts even by post-Soviet standards. There's a very good reason why Ukraine closed their airspace almost right away and continue to keep it closed.

To pre-emptively address the "but that would be too costly" angle: well, maybe that should've been factored in before greenlighting the invasion. Boo-hoo. Does keeping it open look cheap now?

In a quick decision, in a high-stress scenario during an actual attack, possibly. Even if they have the capacity to make that decision correctly otherwise, every system—including the human element—is fallible, and procedures in those circumstances are likely to err on the side of safety-from-attack, rather than safety-for-potential-attacker.

(OTOH, the rerouting of the plane afterward was clearly intentional murder with the hope it would help cover up the shooting incident, whether or not the shooting itself was an accident.)

Different types of missiles exist. A cruise missile (for which the Russians have a much better name - winged missile) can be confused with an airplane, as it is essentially a drone with a turbojet engine. A ballistic missile travelling at supersonic/hypersonic speeds is much easier to discriminate based on velocity alone. Also, those are usually tracked all the way from a launch site using infrared cameras on satellites. The European incursions were mostly cruise missiles and the Iranian mopeds (and at least one ballistic incident that was likely a Ukrainian air defense S-300 missile that the Ukrainians lost control of; this is another problem that happens every now and then to everyone).

Completely irrelevant if there are missiles that fit the profile of something else because some fit the profile of an airliner end of story

Then you are comfortable making a decision that could cost thousands of lives over one with a few hundred without taking in any other information other than a radar bounce that is approximately the same size/speed.

I mean you're largely correct. What I'm saying is that there may be a standing order to destroy all ballistic threats, and to exercise a very high degree of caution (high level approvals for each engagement) with any potential air breathing / subsonic threats. I imagine this is a common order given to Patriot batteries in hot, but not war, areas.

BTW, this is a bit similar to why the US very clearly advertises the Tomahawk as not nuclear capable - so that a few subsonic blips do not trigger a strategic exchange. The Russians do not do that, many of their commonly used missiles are dual purpose.

The Tomahawk was deployed with nuclear warheads, in several variants, between 1983–2010 or 2013 [0]. As far as I can tell, only the ground-launched variants were consistently advertised as non-nuclear, and that was to comply with the bilateral treaty obligations of the INF [1]—and there was a ground-launched nuclear Tomahawk, too [2], which was destroyed in 1991 when the INF treaty came into effect.

I don't think that there was ever a *unilateral* US aversion to these things. We've fielded large numbers [3] of nuclear-warhead cruise missiles—air-, sea-, and ground-launched, spanning much of the Cold war. We're currently developing a new one right now [4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile_family)#Vari...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-Range_Nuclear_For...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-109G_Gryphon

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nuclear_cruise_missil... ("Category: Nuclear cruise missiles of the United States")

[4] https://news.usni.org/2024/06/06/report-to-congress-to-on-nu... ("Report to Congress on Nuclear-Armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile")

Ugh, I was clearly wrong about the Tomahawk, and I don't know why I thought so. It's probably not a believable story for the adversary, so such self-inhibition cannot yield any strategic results anyways.

Are you meaning (for example) old radar equipment with generated profiles unable to distinguish between what more modern equipment could?

I can think of at least two incidents where the military was deciding between downing and not downing an airliner, and decided on the former. Oddly, they both involve Korean Air and the Soviet military.

One hopes the modern Russian military is less enthusiastic about such things, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it.

This also occurred at least once with Canada/US military (but still Korean aircraft) during the panic on September 11, 2001 — an aircraft that was actually just doing normal stuff, very nearly got shot down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_085

I don't know about "nearly got shot down". They were escorted to a different airport and ordered to land, but despite several miscommunications they followed instructions and landed safely.

> One hopes the modern Russian military is less enthusiastic about such things

Given that they have just done it again, I’d bet they have plenty of enthusiasm.

The past couple of times look likely to be legitimate confusion, probably coupled with a lack of care. In the KAL shootdowns, the Soviets intercepted, saw that they were airliners, and shot them down anyway.

Prigozhin was shot down when on a commercial flight wasn’t he?

That was a private jet, and probably a bomb planted on the plane before flight, although it’s hard to say for sure.

> In the KAL shootdowns, the Soviets intercepted, saw that they were airliners, and shot them down anyway.

As I understand the pilot in the KAL 007 shoot down claimed that he visually identified the plane as a Boeing-type airliner years later, but also claimed he did not report that to control because it was not material since such aircraft could be readily converted to intelligence work which was what was the concern for which it was being intercepted. There is no additional support for this, and lots of things the pilot claimed about the incident are inconsistent with the evidence from radar tracks, flight data recorders of the shot down plane, and the records of the Soviet communications relating to the attack, so this particular unverifiable claim probably shouldn't be given much weight.

KAL 902, sure, we know that the pilot identified it as an airliner, tried to convince command not to have it shot down, but then followed the order to shoot it down.

Is there any doubt that the pilot who intercepted KAL007 got a decent look at the plane first? It should have been pretty obviously an airliner as long as it wasn’t miles and miles away.

The heat signature from multiple big turbofan engines and the radar signatures for the same could look similar to a bomber or cargo military plane, so here again a human needs to discriminate somehow.

Humans can’t but maybe AIs can coordinate at light speed to determine at the last minute if a plane should be shot down or not.

Thats not true at all, and I have the receipts to prove it. When the Russians shot down KAL007, it was preceeded by numerous phone calls and meetings. Russian pilots cannot fire missiles without remote authorization from central command. The chain of communications is well documented. KAL007 was first radar identified and fighters were scrambled at 16:33. They obtained visual contact at or around 18:05 and reported it to be a potential civilian airliner. After much discussion, an order to shoot it down was given, which they did, 21 minutes later at as 18:26, nearly 2 hours after it was detected on air defence radar.

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-shot-in-the-dark-the-u...

KAL 007 was shot down as a suspected spy plane in peacetime, not as a suspected attack weapon in war time.

Please don’t mistake explanation for excuse.

> deconfliction equipment

By this do you mean "electronic warfare" equipment, like radar/laser detectors and other such "target searching and seeking" detectors, as well as jammers, spoofers, and other such "search or seek disruption" devices?

I think they mean fancy IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) emitters. If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-spoofable way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do this. Is there any interesting textbook on electronic warfare, I wonder?

> Is there any interesting textbook on electronic warfare, I wonder?

I know that there are unclassified textbooks on this very topic, but I've long forgotten their names.

> If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-spoofable way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do this.

Well, part of this problem is pretty trivial to solve: if you're coming back from a mission and are well in friendly airspace, you don't need to be stealthy at all, so you turn on your radio transmitters.

It's my understanding that when you're on a mission where you need to be as hard to spot as possible, you turn off all unnecessary transmitters and rely on Command telling Air Traffic Control and other interested parties where you're operating so as to reduce the chance that you collide with another aircraft and/or get shot down by friendlies.

DSSS is magic. Truly. It's like you can create an ~infinite number of "new frequencies" to send on, each being orthogonal to any other, then chose them cryptographically as needed. With enough care it's possible to make it difficult for the adversary to even detect the presence of a signal. And the tech used by the likes of F-35 with MADL and low-probability-of-intercept radars may be even fancier than that.

That being said in the Red Sea incident they likely were not stealthy at all. For one F-18 has a rather big cross section, it's a 4th generation jet. For another the Houthis are not known to operate any sensible air defense (I may be wrong here, someone please correct me if I'm wrong).

Any serious hardware Ansar Allah operates is provided by Iran, and Iran is not capable of shooting down IAF aircraft flying over their own territory. Ansar Allah did not shoot down an F-18.

I don't know either, but thought about it a lot at one point.

First, you only respond to correctly encrypted/signed requests. Everything else you ignore.

So, second, once you have your valid request, you respond to it, also in an encrypted fashion. IIRC F-35 can use their radars, with their bean-forming abilities, for stealthy comms, sending a very narrow beam of radio signals to the recipient.

And if this is fantasy, I suppose by the time you receive an IFF query, you know you're about to be shot at. So you might as well respond, sacrificing stealth. Hence why you want to really be sure you're really asked by your side, rather than receiving a spoof request.

Airlines just broadcast a ton of public information about themselves, so they don't really need an IFF system. They put their hands up and say "don't shoot, I'm a civilian!".

> by the time you receive an IFF query, you know you're about to be shot at

I don’t think that’s the most common case for an IFF query. AWACS oversight aircraft likely issue more IFF queries than fighter intercepts do. You still want to respond to a friendly AWACS inquiry, even though that aircraft is 100nm away and no direct/immediate threat to you.

100nm (more or less) is the positive identification radar advisory zone for a carrier group airspace... (AKA REDCROWN)

Less than 100 nanometers?

It always gets me when someone abbreviates nautical miles in lowercase even though context is (almost) always clear it can't be nanometers.

An AWACS aircraft within 100 nanometers of you would indeed represent a direct and immediate threat. :)

TIL that nm isn’t actually accepted as an abbreviation for nautical miles. (It’s used so commonly in aviation that I assumed it was correct and it took me 3 or 4 searches to accept that this thing I knew was correct actually wasn’t. Thanks [seriously]!)

Same when people use “mhz” for megahertz

There are a few from Artech house you can find.

AESA radars send radar impulses on different frequencies that appear to the observer to be random (and thus hard to figure out and jam).

They could use something similar for communication. Send the first byte on a frequency, the second byte on another one, etc.... The frequencies could be calculated to be un-distinguishable from the background radio radiation. Of course, both the sender and the receiver have to agree on this mechanism.

They do:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spect...

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

The really clever counterpart is how to transmit through your own spread-spectrum jamming. Quiet slots in the jamming must be manipulated in the same way as the active broadcast. For example, this allows communication to a ground convoy that is jamming all frequencies to prevent wireless remote-control IED detonation.

I assumed they meant the military transponder and UHF radio equipment.

> This happens everywhere, just the other day an American F-18 was shot down by an American destroyer in the Red Sea, and an F-18 carries additional econfliction equipment that an airliner doesn't have.

The Houthis claim the F-18 was downed by them[1], so it's still not clear if this was an actual friendly fire incident. This is consistent with reports the carrier retreated to northern red sea soon after the incident.

[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241222-yemens-houthis-cl...

No, it's pretty clear.

It is as clear as this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown

That depends on whether you trust the Houthis or the US Navy's sheepish apology for shooting at two F-18s (one missed), which will almost certainly have career consequences for somebody.

The carrier "retreating" is also consistent with a lot of other scenarios, including just having fucked up majorly and needing a safe place to spend some quality time yelling at people.

The Houthis have no credibility, so I'm inclined to believe the Navy here.

They claim a lot of things, but whatever air defense they have comes from Iran, and Iran, as we just saw, isn't capable of shooting down IAF F-15s flying over their own airspace. Ansar Allah did not shoot down an American F-18. I don't believe Ansar Allah has any meaningful air defense at all; it would make no strategic sense for them to invest in it, they have no hope of maintaining air superiority against any of their adversaries. Like Hezbollah, which trained them, and which also has no meaningful air defense, their strategy is to be hard to bomb effectively.

The IAF did not fly over Iranian airspace, they launched ballistic missiles from Iraq.

I'm reading conflicting reports, but let's stipulate that; I don't think it makes any difference to the point I'm making. The better, clearer example is Lebanon, which hosts the crown jewel of the IRGC's proxy forces, and which doesn't have even a pretense of modern anti-aircraft defense. What would the point be? These are territories and militaries without meaningful air forces; they have already defaulted away air superiority. Their strategy is for that not to matter.

According to BBC Persian (quoting Israeli sources) and many Israeli media , the IAF flew "hundreds" of sorties over Iranian airspace on that eventful night in October.

The reporting is that they were F35s though, not F15.

Iran's air defence system is based on the older Russian S300, which is incapable of detecting them.

Of course it wasn't that long ago that Iran was flying F14s and had complete air superiority over its neighbours. How the times have changed.

I've seen credible reporting of F-35's, F-15's, and F-16's, all of which are platforms the IAF operates.

Very possible.

We also now know that the Israelis had informed the Iranians just before the attack through diplomatic channels of the impending attack, and that it would only contain specific military objectives.

Is the S300 just that useless? Possible. Did the Iranians decide to not respond and to "take one on the chin" in order to avoid a cycle of ever increasing conflict? Maybe. Had espionage already disabled Iran's air defence system? Also possible. We probably won't know for another 100 years.

Yeah, I don't think the strike on Iran shed as much light on this question as I'd originally thought it might, but it still seems clearly to be the case that air defense is not a big part of the Axis of Resistance strategy. Ansar Allah fought an open war against Saudi Arabia in the mid-late 2010s, during which the Royal Saudi Air Force routinely flew over Houthi-held territory, and so far as I know they've never verifiably shot a flight down.

Again, I think the most useful model here is Lebanon. Hezbollah has a desultory complement of SAM launchers, but no meaningful control over its airspace.

Oh yes that's just absolutely fanciful boasting by the Houthis.

The Houthis were probably not far off from claiming to have shot down the Ingenuity chopper which NASA lost on Mars . In reality they can't shoot down a Cessna 172.

I think they've taken down a couple MQ-9's, at least one of which we acknowledged.

The actual quote is:

> Saree explained that the operation “was carried out using eight cruise missiles and 17 drones, resulting in the downing of an F-18 fighter jet while the destroyers attempted to intercept the Yemeni drones and missiles.”

So I think its possible that it was both a friendly fire incident and that the downing was the restult of the the Yemini attack.

Ward Carroll (former F-14 aviator) gives a complete description of the friendly-fire incident:

Navy Cruiser Shot Down Super Hornet During Carrier Approach (and Nearly Hit Another One)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoYOsX2GpX4

What I don’t understand is why Russian SAM operators did not appear to expect the airliner via its flight plan. Commercial flights file flight plans with Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs). Flights into Russia would almost certainly be filed with FATA, the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency.

I see two possibilities: 1) the flight plan was known to the officer in charge of the SAM site and he was under orders to shoot the plane down and now they’re trying to cover it up or 2) it was a genuine mistake and so there was some kind of miscommunication or perhaps the air defence forces weren’t even looking at flight plans and just shooting at anything that looked suspicious on radar. Gross incompetence and lack of training and coordination in the Russian military are all issues we’ve come to expect so it’s easy to see how this could happen without knowing for sure. And since Russia seems to be in full denial/obstruction mode we might never know exactly what went wrong.

I’m going to put my money on gross incompetence and lack or training based on videos I’ve seen of assaults made by soldiers using electric scooters and golf carts…

>incompetence and lack of training

Seems the most likely, for all the usual reasons, and it seems pretty clear from recent conflicts that Russia still subscribes to the game plan of mass numbers of expendable troops, equipment, etc less so well trained.

Probably little choice when you're running a Kleptocracy. It appears there's no part of the Russian system immune to corruption / etc.

Right, but doesn't that offer the perfect cover if Putin actually wanted someone on that flight killed?

Does he need cover? The windows people keep falling out of don't seem very covered.

A lot of the denials / diversions made by Putin’s regime can seem absurd to us but we’re not necessarily the intended audience for them. The regime as a whole has a post-truth propaganda MO designed to subvert reality by offering competing and contradictory narratives in order to sow confusion and distrust.

Last I checked, Embraers don't have operable windows

Boeings on the other hand...

Shooting down an commercial airliner seems far riskier / just more complicated / hassle compared to "typical" assassination efforts. It's not as if Russian leadership is afraid to do that.

Prigozhin.

Well it was general aviation (another Embraer Jet, coincidentally) as opposed to commercial, but close enough.

Still the most likely explanation is human error. There have been so many shoot downs of airlines across the world in the recent past that it is not surprising any more.

Prigozhin was about sending a message, and using a method of assassination that ultimately Prigozhin himself could not use. Only Putin can kill you with a missile strike.

Why would Putin need that? The plane was literally landing in russia. Putin could just have that person be arrested then or just disappear ("must have been russian maffia"). Not like russians try to hide murdering people.

Prigozhin was landing in Russia too.

A half hearted cover for assassination is very Russian. Unlikely falls, weird car crashes, novel poisons. It’s got a long history.

Prigozhin was a very different case, not that many people have their own paramilitary organization to defend them. Only other such person I can think of is someone like Kadyrov.

Yea, had it been Kadyrov I wouldnt rule out assination. But no such important person in russia flies commerical.

You mean the guy that had his own army, and had support by a large chunk of russia? The guy Putin had publicly said would face no criminal consequences?

This is Russia, so assuming malice or incompetence is redundant.

But in all likelihood it was a mistake; if they were serious about killing it they'd have shot more missiles, and they're not in a position to be wasting AAMs on non-military targets.

> they're not in a position to be wasting AAMs on non-military targets.

And yet they keep doing it. Accident does seen most likely though.

> he was under orders to shoot the plane down and now they’re trying to cover it up

I highly doubt that's the case. Even though Russia went full evil mode a while ago, it's not that reckless (yet). I don't foresee any sane explanation for this kind of order. I believe a mistake and/or miscommunication is more likely to be the root cause. Sadly it'd be quite naive to expect a thorough publicly available investigation summary from Russian side. You are right here.

> I don't foresee any sane explanation for this kind of order.

The "malice/incompetence" heuristic is really a statement about prior probability more than anything. Even though it may seem as "cautious," or avoiding uncertainty, not updating your priors is doing exactly the opposite! You _should_ assume malice as long as russia is concerned, and it's otherwise up to them to prove incompetence. However, like you would probably guess, it's in their best interest to introduce as much uncertainty as possible. On a different note, there's interesting discourse in iterated prisoner's dilemma regarding _noise_, or communication error. It recognises that any "real" systems is imperfect, and therefore will introduce error. I wonder if they ever recognised that there's advantage to deliberately introducing noise, and falsely attributing it to the system itself!

you're assuming this really was Russian, but mossad captured several Russian bases/arms depos last weeks.

Why would they bother with that, when they have a perfectly usable constellation of space lasers?

to get the usa to bomb iran for them. you know, the usual.

It sounds like they'd made multiple attempts to land at Grozny and failed due to poor weather, were asking to divert back to Baku, and due to GPS interference were asking for vectors rather than being able to navigate to waypoints on their own. They may well not have been anywhere their flight plan would have indicated.

After they were shot at, they were not allowed by Russian authorities to land in Grozny or any of the other nearby Russian airports, but were told to divert across the Caspian Sea to another country.

During the crossing, they were subjected to GPS jamming by Russia, and damage from the missile caused them to lose most controls.

The heroic efforts of the pilots got them almost to the airport, but at least some people survived.

> they were not allowed by Russian authorities to land in Grozny or any of the other nearby Russian airports

They were not denied landing. It was not possible to land. The weather excluded visual approach, there was no ILS and landing with GPS wasn’t possible due to jamming, which started because of the drone attack.

There’s fair share of responsibility on Russian air defense which has not ensured safety of civilian aircraft, but that flight should not have happened in the first place, so that’s on Russian government which did not close the airspace in advance and on the airline which decided to continue flights despite that it has already been known that air defense us working in the area.

Total speculation but spurious reports of "Ukrainian drone attack" sounds suspicious. Would it possible that the "attack" was just the involved airliner wandering out of a designated safe area and flying into SAM coverage, by chance?

for sure a mistake just due to the fact that most of russia is incompetent and corrupt. Makes no sense why russia would shoot down a plane filled with russian citizens flying to a russian airport. Just a fuck up due to russians being incompetent.

loud assasination with collateral damage to send a message

It would be interesting to know who was in the plane. Russia has assassinated this way before with Yevgeny Prigozhin.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66599733

The most salient example of that actually happening was with Prigozhin. Still not a full civilian airliner. Collateral damage was limited.

If you really want to hate Russia for this, just remember that sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

I would say the most salient example is MH370.

The more you read about it, the more you become in disbelief. If it was an operation, it is one of the most advanced ones that I've ever read about. They knew exactly how to deactivate beacons, avoid military radar, there was a power and communications outage (computer interference?), the airplane kept flying for another 7 hours (without detection!), there was no distress call, ... and so on, which cumulatively is extremely unlikely to occur by chance, and would speak to extremely knowledgeable and capable agents. The bodies were never found, so it is possible that the passengers were offloaded. Imagine going to those lengths just to capture one person, or a group? The only other time I've seen that level of coordination was with Edward Snowden.

> If it was an operation,

Quite a big "if". I don't know of any reason to believe it was anything other than one insane pilot. One of the other things your "operation" has to do is plant the flight plan on the pilot's PC.

That is indeed another improvable alternate theory.

From my perspective, it's unusual to commit suicide in such a silent way, with such elaborate attention to detail. He could have killed the copilot, and had knowledge about disabling beacons, perhaps also about avoiding radar detection. But why? As an elaborate prank in creating the greatest mystery in aviation history?

Hijackings are usually far more loud. Distress calls, passengers contacting loved ones, a manifesto is published, or the airplane is destroyed defiantly (GermanWings, Q400 2018 incident, ...).

Everything about it is extremely unusual.

Given that any explanation must be extremely unusual, I think the explanation that only requires one weirdly competent and motivated person still has an Occam's edge over one that requires hundreds of such people.

So, Lee Harvey Oswald?

To whom?

defectors, detractors. It was Azerbaijani Airlines, headed to Grozny, so maybe a passenger from either of those regions? Azerbaijan is in intense conflict with Armenia and highly dependent on Russian support. The region is deep in conflict, and strongly authoritarian. Plenty of people people who would need a strong message to understand that they're not as independent as they might think.

Of course you have to evaluate the facts yourself, but it's healthy to have some critical perspective.

Why would russia shoot down a plane if it was someone defecting TO russia?

"In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state in exchange for allegiance to another, changing sides in a way which is considered illegitimate by the first state." - Wikipedia

You can have defectors internally in the country. In Russia, defectors have a tendency to fall out of a window, regardless of who might be walking on the street (collateral damage).

Nonsense. You would catch the person after landing instead of downing an entire plane.

So tell us. Who was assinated to send a message? Not a single important person was on the plane.

Everyone is important to someone.

With that logic you can claim everyone is assinated by Putin because everyone on earth is important enough to be assinated by putin.

Exactly, I once said something not very nice about Putin on reddit and if he reads it, I would expect he wouldn’t be too happy. It’s why I no longer fly on planes given the distance Russian anti air can reach.

According to the latest reporting, the actual flight deviated from the advance flight plan by hundreds of miles. I don't know the regs in that region, but I suspect that IFR flight plans must declare an alternate, and it's unclear if it was Makhachkala and, if so, why they crossed the sea instead.

That seems to have been the real problem. Russia was not anticipating airline traffic there. Sounds like there has been fairly active drone activity in that area.

update: Another comment suggested a plausible different order of events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42521882

>That seems to have been the real problem

The real problem here is starting a war. In a more peaceful context, even being hundreds of miles off from your flight plan wouldn't have resulted in this plane getting shot down.

I get what you're saying, though. It sounds unlikely that shooting this plane down was done because anyone specifically wanted to shoot down this particular civilian plane.

> Russia was not anticipating airline traffic there

So there was no flight plan, or the Russians didn't read it?

Suspecting it's because of active EW jamming of GPS bc the airport was under drone attack. They probably don't have flight plans live feed at individual SAM crew level and confirm via ADSB feed instead which was way off here. So once it descended bellow certain FL it was misidentified as drone by the local Pantsir crew

most sensible explanation

Well, it's the WSJ. In fact, we do not yet have the final official conclusion of the commission with the participation of Russia and Azerbaijan, which is working on this case. Let's wait and refrain from empty speculation in an already tense international situation.

In 2001 we also had Siberian Airlines flight 1812 from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk was shot down by Ukrainian S-200 during a joint Russian/Ukrainian exercise!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812

>joint Russian/Ukrainian exercise

Nope, that was Ukrainian exercise

Any proofs? Everywhere articles says that accident was during joint exercise.

They were 'joint' because the Ukraine used a test range in Crimea that belongs to Russian Black Sea fleet based in Sevastopol. All launches were authorized by Ukrainians, Russians fired a single short-range missile and that's it. But, yeah, let's call it joint Russian-Ukrainian to shift the blame towards Russians.

You can read the details here using google translate if you like: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Катастрофа_Ту-154_над_Чёрным_м...

Russian generals, Russian troops taking participation in exercise. Russians firing a rocket. Exercise located at Russian shooting range.

And yet you wrote it was not a joint exercise. Russia Today can be proud of you, comrade!

Was the Iraq war a joint war of the US and Ukraine against Iraq? [0] If you say it was, then okay, the exercise was joint too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_involvement_in_the_I...

> But, yeah, let's call it joint Russian-Ukrainian to shift the blame towards Russians.

No, I mentioned it because a joint Russian-Ukrainian exercise is unthinkable now.

My apologies then.

Using Google Translate on the Wikipedia citation[0]:

> On the Ukrainian website “Maidan-inform” expressed doubts about whose arsenal – Russian or Ukrainian – the S-200 missile was fired. Russian equipment, radar stations and warships also participated in the training.

Ukraine shot it down, but it sure sounds like a joint exercise.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160508084452/http://2001.novay...

But this plane was not hit by S200 - no S200 parts or hexagen was found by Russians at crash site.

> found by Russians

Well there you go, airtight proof.

Russians blame Ukraine, but provided no proof for that in court, as usual. If you have any physical evidence that Tu-154 was shot by S200 missile, then bring it on. If no, then stop spreading Russian fakes.

How it is different from MH-17 (Russia blame Ukraine, found guilty in court) or this J2-8432 (Russian blame Ukraine, ...)?

Oh I was being sarcastic lol. Obviously the Russians would lie about this.

Embraer is very well designed aircraft the fact it was able to fly for so long after sustaining so much damage is a testament to its robust engineering and design.

ERJ-190 has 0 in-flight deaths caused by aircraft failure. In 2006 an Embraer Legacy jet collided mid-air with a boeing 737; The boeing fell to pieces, the Embraer landed safely[1]. In 2019 an Embraer ERJ-190 flew with misrrigged control cables; the aircraft was under extremely high structural load until pilots got enough control to land it safely[2].

Embraer engineers are clearly doing something right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gol_Transportes_A%C3%A9reos_Fl... [2] https://aerossurance.com/safety-management/erj190-p4kcj-main...

I won't comment on the robustness of the Embraer construction, but I should point out that the 2006 incident is not necessarily indicative of that; the two aircraft collided head-on, and the relatively fragile vertical winglet of the smaller jet severed the outer third of the Boeing's wing before breaking away, almost cleanly. The Embraer thus was able to continue flying while the 737 was doomed. Swapping the positions of the two aircraft would probably have produced an opposite outcome.

Wikipedia's account says that the Boeing lost "about half" its wing.

Admiral Cloudberg - https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-fickle-hand-of-fate-... - says "nearly in half". But from the scaled diagram of the collision in that article, your "outer third" seems more accurate.

Either way - for anyone familiar with Boeing's WWII bomber heritage, the glossed-over assumption that the Boeing's situation was hopeless really sticks out.

Yeah Embraers are widely considered to be the safest aircraft in the skies. The E-135/140/145 has literally never had a single fatality in over 30 years of flying.

A few years back I was flying to London, and when I got the ticket it was for an Embraer landing in London City Airport. I was excited about the airport as after flying many times to London it was the only one out of the five nearby airports I had never been to, but the aircraft got me nervous: I never heard of Embraer and it was smaller (I thought bigger=safer, maybe that’s still true?) than the usual Airbus and Boeing I was using regularly. Ignorance will do that, I wonder if this (ignorant customers) is still a factor when airlines buy aircrafts.

BTW the airline sadly put me in a different plane to a different airport in the last minute, no reason given.

The kind of passenger who knows what kind of jet they’ll be flying on has probably heard of Embraer. I do think this is an impediment to Comac tho

Most of my flights (within the USA) are on ERJ-175. I even switched airlines midway through the year and this was still true. I only see Airbus and Boeing for transcontinental flights.

London City Airport (LCY) has a very short runway with an approach right next to houses and apartment buildings. If the weather is very windy, especially with cross-winds, they are quick to cancel or divert flights.

I was once in a plane that had three landing attempts there aborted at the last second before eventually diverting to Southend Airport. The plane was bobbing around like a cork on the end of a string, quite a few passengers were airsick from the wild turbulence or screaming hysterically convinced we were all about to die.

That 2006 incident isn't a good example it's almost entirely due to the fact that a non-essential part of the Embraer neatly sliced a big chunk of the airliner's wing off.

Probably the only winner in this situation, really.

Makes Boeing look extra crappy given recent events, too.

Also pantsir is a shitty AA weapon. Like everything designed in modern Russia.

Except the E190 completely lacks manual reversion unlike the Boeing 737 NG. If it had, it would've been landable.

Also this means Russia is the biggest killer of airline passengers?

Iran had also contributed significantly in 2020. Although their regime ended up acknowledging their role, unlike Russia whose policy is bold faced lies.

The US has one of the largest contributions of all time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Sure, although at the time missiles weren't the biggest killer of airline passengers.

You could argue the US is partly responsible for the 2020 disaster as well.

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

Not very seriously.

The Iranians shot down a Ukrainian jet with Russian missile. Blaming Americans for the stupidity of Iranians is ridiculous.

Maybe not entirely seriously, but there is a direct causative path initiated by the United States that you can follow which lead to this result.

Iran shot down this airliner after mistaking it for a cruise missile launched by the US, which was arguably a credible fear given the events of days prior. If the US didn't assassinate Qasem Soleimani (with a drone, near an airport), Iran wouldn't have made this terrible error, as they would not have made a retaliatory strike.

Additionally, you can go even further back and argue that if the US didn't withdraw from the nuclear deal struck in 2015, none of these events would have taken place.

You can also argue if Iran did not have imperialist project over neighboring countries this event would've also not happened.

That's not a counter to the parent's point. The parent is saying there are many critical factors, one of which was the US performing an assassination.

Saying "there were other critical factors" both agrees with the parent post and doesn't counter the idea that the US was a factor.

This is absolutely a counter. There would be no assassination of an Iranian general in Baghdad had he not commanded the insurgency with the sponsored militias in Iraq.

That sounds like "another critical factor". A chain of events led to this. The parent is saying "one link in the chain is US involvement", you are saying, a different link in the chain is Iranian involvement. Both can be true, and neither invalidates the other. You've done nothing to invalidate the parent's post because you haven't removed their link from the chain, you've just added other salient links to the chain.

Stop treating blame like it's some simple, single element. It's a complicated, multi faceted chain of events.

> Maybe not entirely seriously, but there is a direct causative path initiated by the United States that you can follow which lead to this result.

No, there isn't. There's a direct causative path initiated by Xerxes I when he launched the second invasion of Greece.

There’s a direct causal path from any event to every event in its future light cone. You need more than “if not X then not Y” to blame Y on X. Otherwise you end up with ridiculous things like saying your cat saved your life by barfing on the carpet because cleaning it up made you late for your bus which crashed.

Using this line of reasoning, you might as well go back to Cain and Able.

If country a starts a war and then country b defending itself accidentally shoots down a civilian airliner it’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. You’re saying it’s completely ridiculous to blame country a?

If you qualify country A's actions as "starting a war" then country B had started many dozens of wars themselves in the previous decade, and subsequent one.

Irrelevant. You may as well walk back to the first mover and blame God.

That's basically my point. Ultimate responsibility lies with those who decided to fire a missile at a civilian airliner without doing any due diligence or applying common sense, not those who "created tension" or whatever you want to claim the US did in that situation.

If the iron dome accidentally shoots down in civilian airliner it’s ‘ridiculous’ to blame anyone other than Israel was your statement

I was assuming you were referring to the Ukrainian airliner shot down by Iran in the aftermath of the Suliemani killing, which is an actual example and not a hypothetical one.

It is. It's ridiculous when Israel hits aid workers with missiles and rockets, it's crazy when people wearing press jackets are killed even after communicating their position directly to military command and control. It's ridiculous when children die early, gruesome deaths because they sat next to a bad man with a pager at a Lebanese grocery store.

It's not the 1950s anymore, accountable nations are expected on the international stage to understand what exactly they are shooting at. Israel is under much closer scrutiny than Russia because they represent modernized doctrine and should be using their technological superiority to enable more targeted strikes rather than more indiscriminate ones. Modern Russian warfighting tactics have been under serious scrutiny since the Afghan retreat, then again in the Gulf War, and then again now during the retreat from Syria.

The only "clean" war Russia fought in recent years was Crimea, which was "won" by lying to the international community and breaking their trust forever. As evidenced by Ukraine, today's Russian republic cannot win a war with tactical prowess alone. The "special military operation" has devolved into IRBM fearmongering and rattling the nuclear sabre - Putin knows he's not the president of a world superpower anymore, he's a Tesco-branded Kim Jong-Un.

Yes. We rightfully expect people with guns to have an idea of what they are shooting at. Firing wildly at anything that moves tends to earn condemnation.

You could also argue that the earth is flat and lots of people do.

No one can rationally argue that that was partly the US' responsibility, though.

Except...the US isn't partly responsible.

No clue why this is being flagged. It's a clear example of a SAM being used against passenger aircraft.

Because certain countries immediately evoke knee jerk reaction. Iran bad. US good. Simple black and white view

Maybe because that incident happened almost 40 years ago?

Russia has a military with a lot of equipment that is at least that old.

The US shooting down that airliner is also mentioned in that WSJ article that this thread is about.

Yeah, it provides some history, and I wouldn't have flagged it personally, even though I don't think it was a particularly good response to the question. But then some one flagged my comment too, so maybe just trolls flagging everything.

The internal dynamics of different nations is always interesting to me. My understanding was that in Iran top leadership wanted to maintain the lie but there was a lot of resistance within the government, so much so they chose to admit it.

It tells us a lot about their internal power dynamics if their top leadership actually listened to the rest of the government on this.

Iran is governed by factions that are occasionally aligned, but can have divergent interests. It’s very hard to understand recent Iranian history if one assumes that a single political entity is in control. I mean, Khamenei is nominally in control, but it’s not always that tight.

Russia is very different: Putin clearly has absolute control over all government entities.

Were that true, I doubt all the bribery and corruption would have been allowed to destroy their military equipment.

I’m surprised they were able to shoot a plane down at all.

> Were that true, I doubt all the bribery and corruption would have been allowed to destroy their military equipment.

I wasn’t precise enough. He does not control every individual specifically, just all organisations (as in, there is none that dares to contradict him, and the people in charge who do, don’t do it for long).

That’s a consequence of the power structure. It is optimised to avoid factions and keeping dissenting voices under control, but micromanagement has its limits. To some extent, corruption also helps in several ways at the highest levels. This seems to be one of the reasons why they cannot stop it. It enables selective enforcement, and is an effective tool to get rid of people who get too powerful, too independent, or not obedient enough (there are many examples of this in the last couple of years: when Putin wants to reshuffle the government he finds corruption charges). It seems that this culture spread down the ranks and pervades the whole state.

> I’m surprised they were able to shoot a plane down at all.

If anything, a civilian aircraft is a sitting duck for anti-aircraft missiles: it has no decoys, no flares, no jamming or any kind of countermeasures. Surely, not shooting it down when firing at it takes some effort. Also, we don’t know how many missiles were fired.

Apologies, I’m not trying to be that pedantic person on the internet. Thank you for the thoughtful response.

Russia (and the USSR) have shot down six passenger airlines so far.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_902

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_902

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 (Killing US rep Larry McDonald.)

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812 (Joint Russia-Ukraine mission, but it's purported that Russians coerced Ukraine into taking the blame.)

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

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleva_(airplane)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Wagner_Group_plane_crash

Luckily, this is probably one of the few variables you can at least try to workaround, as you can choose/not choose flights that go over/close to warzones/Russia. Compared to unexpected issues like the typical Boeing doors falling off, that we as passengers can't really try to include when planning where to fly.

Normal people do not try to plot the course of their upcoming flights and calculate the proximity to the largest country in the world which happens to border 14 other countries.

Normal people also do not keep backups of their important data.

I consider myself a fairly normal person. On a recent flight from Istanbul to Taipei, I checked the flight path to make sure it wasn't flying over any "suspect" countries.

The airline would need to be deliberately avoiding them: the great-arc circle between those two passes directly over Grozny. Smart call to double-check that.

> Normal people do not try to plot the course of their upcoming flights

I am in India. Everyone is very aware of the Air India flights that overfly Russia, Iran, et cetera and those—mostly foreign airlines— who do not.

How are planes bound to Russia expected to avoid Russian airspace?

Very few people have to go to Russia, and if you must, take a train or a bus.

> In 1983, a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 that had strayed into Soviet airspace during a tense period of the Cold War, killing all 269 onboard.

Not the only Soviet shootdown of a KAL flight, either:

> Korean Air Lines Flight 902 (KAL 902) was a scheduled Korean Air Lines flight from Paris to Seoul via Anchorage. On 20 April 1978, the Soviet air defense shot down the aircraft serving the flight, a Boeing 707, near Murmansk, Soviet Union, after the aircraft violated Soviet airspace.

Happily, less deadly:

> The incident killed two of the 109 passengers and crew members aboard and forced the plane to make an emergency landing on the frozen Korpijärvi Lake.

The first one was a tragic accident, but it is hard to blame it on the Russian defense.

The airplane entered heavy militarized Soviet airspace at a time of intense exercises that was known to be off limits by KAL, the soviets tried to contact and warn the airplane multiple times and intercepted it twice till the airplane was shoot down.

This also came in the context of US spy airplanes flying in the area having already poked and embarrassed Soviet air defense in the same weeks.

US was using civilian aircrafts for spying at the time too.

Is this true? I don't have access to the article, but the Boeing crashes and other general loss of control/CFIT must account for a large percentage. Only stats I could find with a quick search are from Airbus who say LOC is the leading cause over the past 20 years (I can see enough of the WSJ article to see it says "...from 2014", so a decade and not like for like).

Edit: Possibly the linked stats exclude deliberate acts - wikipedia expands on this [1] [2]

[0] https://accidentstats.airbus.com/accident-categories/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...

I know that it was number three as it a few weeks ago

https://archive.li/BM5NB

This is just a capture of a captcha

Works on MY machine...

https://www.wsj.com/world/flight-deaths-shot-from-sky-rising...

There, a gift link.

You're probably using Cloudflare DNS, it's a known issue that's been discussed for years. The archive owner deliberately gives bad results to Cloudflare DNS. It's why I prefer not to use it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 - 6 year old discussion on the topic.

Taking a step back from the current incident which is obviously tragic, this is both a testament to how safe flying is and how hard it is to trust human judgment to tell one radar blip from another. At least with some earlier incidents there was less easy ways to check on the flight. The iron curtain was still up and ADS-B transponders weren’t invented. And yet still, here we are with planes getting shot out of the skies.

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

Relevant StackExchange question here[1], asking about counter-measures on passenger aircraft, from when MH-17 was shot down.

[1]: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/7768/why-dont-a...

The safety of air travel should be lauded as one of mankind's greatest achievements.

I'm infinitely more anxious driving home from the airport than at any time in the air.

twenty paragraphs in and still no answer to what was the Biggest Killer

Gravity

I once had a chat with a safety analyst for an airline. He told me: flying isn't dangerous at all, but taking off and landing are.

Taking off isn't even dangerous, it's unintended landings shortly after takeoff that cause harm.

I kind of doubt the claim that "No other cause of aviation fatalities on commercial airliners comes close to shootdowns over those years" (which I believe is meant to mean "since 2014"), given Boeing's solid contribution with their automated fly-into-the-ground-if-a-non-redundant-sensor-fails system.

I can't read the article, but what about DVT (deep vein thrombosis)? wouldn't be surprised if it kills more.

There's a lot of confusing info about that incident still. You typically do not get to fly for 2 hours after an AD hit (if that's what it was), nor can you actually make several attempts at landing. In this case there were several video recordings from the inside while the plane was already in distress. Not one said anything about AD hit. Nor did the pilots say anything about that. In some photos you can also see the holes petaling _outward_ indicating either a straight-through penetration, or internal explosion. The whole thing is confusing AF, and people are jumping to conclusions. The only thing I can think of is perhaps some sort of an AD cannon shot at it, but even then e.g. Pantsir AD cannon (if that's what it was) would almost certainly be loaded with HE or fragmentation rounds (which wouldn't penetrate straight-through), and the altitude would have to be sub-4km. What looks pretty certain is that it wasn't a "missile". Most likely the plane would disintegrate in the air in this case, and if not, we'd know from the people inside the plane.

The IL-2 that was hit by a Ukrainian SAM system & managed to land afterwards had a very similar damage pattern to this aircraft. You absolutely can fly for hours after an AD hit, if you get lucky.

A proximity fused AD missile with a fragmentation charge will explode to the rear of a large airliner if it’s tail-chasing, resulting in exactly the kind of damage we see in both that IL-2 and this case.

I guess we'll see in a few weeks. Kazakhstan is not Russia, and as far as I can tell access to the site of the crash is being given to the involved parties, including Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan says the cause was "external technical influence", whatever that means. And in any case, there are plenty of survivors, and, therefore, direct witnesses.

> Azerbaijan says the cause was "external technical influence", whatever that means.

It is a glaringly obvious euphemism for a military mishap. I respect your hunger for details before arriving at a conclusion, but there was practically no chance this wasn't a missile strike. If you're familiar with Russia's reluctance to admit failure, this should come as a particularly disappointing inevitability.

- Azerbaijan is de-facto reliant on Russia for military support. They would always wait for Russia's admission before declaring an international incident that could threaten their standing. The initial denial and defense is likely protocol for Russian allies.

- Russia's official excuse of a "bird strike" didn't make sense, since there was spall marks on the fuselage that do not originate from turbine failure. Not only does the wreckage make this obvious, but I don't think hydraulics would fail from an isolated bird strike either.

- The ADS-B data absolutely corroborates a military attack. You can very clearly see a controlled ascent to altitude cut off by a jammed transponder, then again the transponder comes online with an unstable flight path. If one engine was disabled by a bird strike, the plane should still be able to trim itself into stable flight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...

- Historically, starting in the USSR and continued by the Russian Federation, there has been a tradition of coverups defending military personnel when they make mistakes. It is unbelievably common both in history and in modern news cycles to hear about fabricated coverups that defend Russia's soldiers from criticism and, more importantly, distance Russia from any relations to the harm they've caused.

To be frank, it was foolish to hold out hope that Russia wasn't responsible from the moment they denied it so vehemently. Some nations cry wolf so often that other countries don't even take the time of day from them. If Russia waited to deliver a truthful response or launched an investigation to correct the source of the error, then there would be a lot less scrutiny and eyerolling from the international community right now. The desperate scramble to cover up an accident of this magnitude is an utter embarrassment for Russia, especially considering how few people were willing to trust the official (and obviously incomplete) Azerbaijan/Russian response. It is disrespectful to the families that deserve an answer with accountability, and another notch in the belt of reasons why we don't take Russian press releases seriously.

how many times in life do you experience AD hits from within a plane as a pilot/passenger? how would they know what to expect? it's clear that the missile hit the back of the plane (tail / fuselage), how would the pilot know whats happening besides losing hydraulics?

AD rocket, by design, inflicts catastrophic damage even on military aircraft that have far better survivability. Even 10K rounds per minute autocannon of the Pantsir would generate such a dense cloud of shrapnel it'd be difficult to mistake it for "birds", especially for the pilots.

the plane probably got hit by a pantsir missile, not autocannon fire. the damage is consistent with a proximity fuse warhead detonation. mh17 had exactly the same type of holes, except the buk missile is more powerful...

That'd be a first, if that's the case. To the best of my knowledge to date there haven't been any other cases where a civilian plane was hit by an AD missile and continued to fly. I can't find anything on Google either. The closest thing we got is flight TWA 840 in 1986 on which flew with a gaping hole in the fuselage, but that wasn't AD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_840_bombing

well then it's a first. i don't find it that unbelievable that a missile detonates near a plane and damages it but not enough for it to immediately crash...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 flew for about an hour with no hydraulics at all with a very similar damage pattern.

The damage on the fuselage seems very similar to MH17.

My understanding is that these kind of missiles explode near the aircraft, sending hundreds of small metal balls in all directions which eventually hit critical parts of the aircraft.

Also, considering how quickly Russians tried to say it wasn't them is generally a good indicator of them being involved.

https://turan.az/en/politics/three-explosions-occurred-near-...

   Asadov Zulfuqar, a flight attendant who survived the crash of the Embraer plane on December 25 belonging to AZAL airline, shared what happened with the aircraft. Currently in the hospital, Asadov told journalists that the plane made two approaches to Grozny airport but was unable to land.

   "On the third approach, we felt an external impact on the plane. Passengers panicked, and we started calming them down. Immediately after that, we felt a second impact, and I felt pain in my forearm. It was a fragment that seriously wounded me, and I began to lose blood. After that, there was another explosion that both we and the passengers felt," he said.

   The flight attendant said that the captain decided to fly to another airport, but the nearest cities did not accept the plane, and it had to fly to Aktau. 
   "Initially, the captain planned to land the plane on water, but then decided to land on land, and it was clear that it would be a hard landing."

   [...] 

   These testimonies from the living witness finally confirm that the plane was shot at, and the holes in its fuselage are the result of three rocket impacts.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2TpF0nlPEw

That doesn't make this any less strange. For one thing _three_ Pantsir hits would definitely have downed the plane. If the plane was not shot at during the first two approaches, why would it be shot at during the third? It would be visible on the radar the entire time, well in advance, since before landing it flies much higher than the drones, and does not try to evade radar detection. Additionally, since it was approaching to land, it was most definitely in constant communication with Grozny ATC and they knew about it. This could also be similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 someone posted below, except the engine would be under the wing rather than in the tail. Another possibility is a drone was shot down in close proximity and they were hit with residual shrapnel from that. That does seem unlikely, but not more so than a passenger plane withstanding three consecutive AD hits and then flying for over an hour.

By people comments it seems that rockets loaded with fragmentation warheads leave the same traces that can be seen in the photos of the tail of the plane, high velocity impacts, a damage very similar to what happened with MH17 flight as someone commented below.

The problem with the approaches probably was due the GPS was suffering spoofing[1], so the same way the avionics was receiving wrong data, can be guessed everyone was receiving wrong data, their "mistake" attack could have come from there, in addition, they did not close the air space to the civil planes, for unknown reasons. They will never admit exactly how they screwed it up, using what happened with MH17 as reference.

But an important matter here also is, even by diverting the plane with a declared emergency to cross the Caspian Sea, the pilots managed to arrive to the coast[3], and the GPS jamming across TWO-THIRDS of the Caspian Sea[2][1] what would have prevented finding survivors and fuselage evidences, had no effect. Now it can be investigated.

[1] https://www.flightradar24.com/blog/azerbaijan-airlines-e190-...

[2] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/4k-az65#3879c26d

[3] Fighting to control and keep the plane flying, as the 3D image in the flightradar24 article[1] shows, rendered from the ADS-B data at moment the GPS jamming stopped. One can see at first glance how hard it was for them to cross the sea. The investigations and the black box will tell better what happened before.

*russian missiles

Are you sure it's still true if you limit to Russia? 1/3 of the deaths came from Iran, for example

You are right. Russia and their buddies then. Not sure how this group is called in these days.

This problem shows how antiquated military systems and thinking really are. Tracking, identifying and deciding on how to act for every thing in the sky, especially things advertising what they are from the second they take-off until they land, shouldn't be this hard. I for one am glad that militaries are actually so bad at their jobs that this can happen. Just imagine how scary they would be if they were actually good at this type of thing.

[flagged]

None of this is new. A meme with this exact scenario has been circulating on Russian social media since 00s.

[flagged]

The Russians / USSR have shot down six passenger aircraft resulting in partial or total loss of life.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_902

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_902

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 (Killing US rep Larry McDonald.)

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812 (Purported that Russians coerced Ukraine to take the blame.)

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

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...

>Purported that Russians coerced Ukraine to take the blame.

Now that was funny.

I think a fundamental part of the reasons that Russia and the West cannot seem to escape a death-march to war is that Russia is so often conflated with the USSR. They are ideologically and politically distinct entities, even as much as some in the current state of Russia might wish for the old days.

Russia legally declared itself a successor to USSR, took the UN seat, nuclear weapons, assumed debt and foreign assets, kept contacts with former communist allies like Cuba, so it’s not completely wrong. The topic of admission of Russia to NATO demonstrates this very well: Putin thought that Moscow is peer to Washington D.C. and needed special invitation (as if USSR resolved hostilities and wanted to partner with the Western bloc). NATO was treating him like any other country in Eastern Europe: apply and we will think about it — didn’t even bother to formally invite (IIRC Stoltenberg basically said in one of the interviews that even if the door was closed, the doorbell was working).

Interesting, I did not know Russia assumed almost all of the USSR debt

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10nnw9s/comm...

Conflated? Russia literally declared itself the successor state of the USSR and assumed the latter's position on the UN Security Council.

It is not that Russia is USSR, it is that USSR was Russia + colonized, enslaved nations, like Russian Empire before it.

The evil of USSR did was because Russia was in charge.

There was never such a thing as a Russian state that didn't include colonized neighbors.

Even if you unwind all the way to the Grand Duchy of Moscow, we'd have to talk about Kazan etc.

How about Novgorod, which was a member of the Hanseatic Union back in the day, among other things?

I think this is highly debatable, as even the European part of Russia hosted no less than dozens of different ethnicities. What you say makes little sense in the context of Russian and generally eastern European history.

I‘d reserve the word „colony“ for its original meaning. USSR was a dictatorship, but not a colonial state. As a matter of fact it even prioritized the reduction of inequality between the republics of the union for several decades.

I‘d reserve the word „colony“ for its original meaning.

Which per Wikipedia is simply:

   A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule.

And which was a perfectly reasonable description of the situation in all the peripheral republics, as well as many constituent parts of the RSFSR itself.

The fact that it might have also provided subsidies to some of the republics at various times (when not withholding food and/or engaging in massive, violent repressive actions against them) is entirely irrelevant to this definition. Recall that the Western colonial powers always bragged about all the infrastructure they built in their colonies, and South Africa always tried to point out the subsidies it provided its Bantustans, etc.

It is not a reasonable description, because there was no „foreign“ rule in USSR. E.g. Russia was not ruling over Ukraine, both were equal parts of the union and both Russian and Ukrainian republican governments were subjects to the rule of the communist party and union government. Same as Germany not being a colony of EU or contemporary Australia not being a colony of the Commonwealth. Russian colonial empire has fallen in 1917-1922 during the civil war.

Now this is gonna shock you, but USSR is Russia.

Russia created the USSR as a legal framework to exert power over its neighbors. This was engineered by Stalin himself.

The most important feature of Russian culture is the sentiment that Russia is great but the world is conspiring to put it down. That's 100% the same in present day Russia as it was in the USSR. They're the same.

> Russia and the West cannot seem to escape a death-march to war is that Russia is so often conflated with the USSR.

Do you think that invading your neighbours might be a contributing factor? We are in a thread about Russia shooting down an airliner, again. It’s pretty amazing to claim equal culpability here.

IMHO, Polish president plane should be counted too. It looks like pilots were tricked by Russians to descent to 50 meters instead of safe 100 meters.

Both of those altitudes seem extremely low. I’m not familiar with this incident, can you provide more details?

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

If you read this long, allegedly well researched piece:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/all-the-presidents-men-t...

tl;dr:

"Amid the endless political struggle, it is easy to lose perspective on the Smolensk Air Disaster as, first and foremost, a plane crash. Had the President not been on board to politicize the tragedy, it would have been obvious to everyone that the flight that day was a disaster waiting to happen. A poorly trained and unqualified crew was charged with flying VIPs into an ill-equipped, decrepit airport amid extremely dense fog."

This phrase should not replace a proper plane crash investigation, isn't?

The facts are:

1) Russians fixed the airfield infrastructure in few hours AFTER the crash. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Tu-154-crash-in-smolensk-...

2) Russians directed Polish pilots to descend to 50 meters, as witnessed by Polish pilot Remigiusz Muś, who died after that.

3) Russians cut 16 seconds from the audio record, then provided the full version. ;-)

Yeah, it looks like a regular day in Russia, but Polish president died.

  “The plane was staying overnight in a hotel, as is often the case for large passenger aircraft relaxing between shifts,” the Kremlin spokesperson said.

  “Unfortunately it had a few drinks, the window was open, and it fell out. Our thoughts are with the victims”.

This is strongly politicized in Poland, there have been many commissions and expertises, and despite most Poles thinking all the worst about Russia - majority (me included) does not believe it to be on purpose.

From the Korean air incident: "As a result of the incident...President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making American satellite-based radio navigation Global Positioning System freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good."

Americans [1][2] and pilots [3][4][5] are not that far behind, though.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302

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

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Eastern_Airlines_Flight_...

Huh? You're comparing engineering failures to firing missiles at civilians?

That's kind of the point of the article isn't it? Comparing different causes of passenger deaths?

Russian missiles -> "Americans" is not apples to apples.

Once Russia figures out how to produce passenger jets we can compare them directly.

All a matter of perspective. Those "engineering failures" were in fact a case of criminal negligence which, by the way, none of the actually responsible people has gone to jail for. As for "firing missiles at civilians", this latest incident reportedly happened to a rerouted plane, in airspace that was being actively contested by enemy drones at that time. Not saying that this isn't a tragedy, or that the Russian military is not to blame, but there are also lots of blanket allegations and generalizations thrown around in this thread, that just seem out of place in a supposedly discerning and intelligent community.

Just so that there isn’t any confusion what russia is all about:

https://youtu.be/_9olGWX-1eI?si=MS4--_WH96BEjiSN

Very appropriate in light of the topic.

This looks like a joke to me.

This obviously is a joke (as a short piece of fiction meant to appear funny, at least to the kind of people supposed to be its target audience) yet this joke is a major part of the actual propaganda operation ran by a primary state-owned TV channel. A friend from Russia confirmed this to me.

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