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Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

I guess the E190 got quite lucky. Pantsir doesn't fire a small missile. Wiki implies it has a 20kg warhead. Pantsirs' role as regimental air defense means that it is very much intended to take out fast jets.

One quirk I wonder about is if these types of missiles are biased towards detonating towards the rear of a target. For a fast jet this would be towards the engines and tail assembly, while for most civilian airliners that would "just be" the tail assembly.

I wonder where the launcher was sited. One would naively expect that the SAM would be sited near the airport, in which case there'd seem to be a high probability that the E190 was more or less flying head on towards the SAM and missile.

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I'm just an armchair nerd, no expert, so I welcome corrections. Going only by Wikipedia, it's a fragmentation warhead probably designed to explode in proximity to the target.

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

20kg of explosive is a lot of hurt. But, depending on where the missile is in relation to the plane, only a small amount of that kinetic force may be transferred to the target. At best, 50% if it's directly beside the target? And at some point it's just kind of a dice roll whether those fragments hit anything vital, sever fuel and hydraulics, etc. From a military standpoint an air to air missile really only needs to damage a target. Any damage at all is going to remove a target from the fight and that airframe will not fly again for a long time if ever.

I will stress again my lack of anything other than armchair knowledge!

One of the rockets (57E6) has a thermal sensor but, also has radar and optical. Hypothetically it could have either hit the target early which was hitting the wing) and missed the tail end of the target or was homing for the heat source which would have been either aircraft engine and probably hit the one closest.

Note this is only going from the Wikipedia page and looking at the armament section.

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

I wonder if hitting an engine on an airliner is kind of a best-case scenario for the plane. Since there are always at least two engines and control surfaces on the other wing. Still extremely Not Good obviously.

The missle that struck MH17 detonated just above the cockpit

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