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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?

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?

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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!

>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?

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.

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

Last I checked, Embraers don't have operable windows

Boeings on the other hand...

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.

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?

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…

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.

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.