Don’t Blame Malaysia Airlines
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"Malaysian officials said an airline could not be expected to have the intelligence information and other resources to make independent determinations to avoid an area where air traffic controllers were still sending planes. But some carriers had already done just that. China Airlines, the flagship carrier of Taiwan, said that it had avoided flying over all of Ukraine since April 4. Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines also confirmed that they had not flown planes through Ukrainian airspace since March 3."
It also looks like Air France and British Airways avoided Ukraine entirely [2]
And even if all airlines had made the mistake of flying over Ukraine, it is absurd to suggest that an airline might not have the "intelligence information and other resources" to make an independent judgement about safety. A single person spending half an hour on the internet would determine that (a) the rebels were shooting down planes using surface-to-air missiles; and (b) there are some surface-to-air missiles that can reach an altitude of 40,000 feet. That is all the information you need to conclude that the area isn't safe for commercial airplanes.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/downing-of-pl...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/17/world/europe/m...
While Air France avoided Ukraine, KLM did not. Given that AF-KLM is a one airline holding [1], that's rather surprising discrepancy.
Knowledge that rebels had active radar-guided SAMs would be derived from a handful of classified assets, from satellite to radar to drone to people. Adversaries to the US are meant to be unaware of these modalities (to prevent countermeasures), but you can bet they are all in use.
The challenge is that disclosure of any facts gleaned from classified systems potentially reveals their capabilities.
Now disclosure is a continuous spectrum, from "there is a threat" to "here is a multispectral image of a launcher", so perhaps there is some shareable information. In considering that, you weigh the utility (external risk) of the information shared against its credibility (details), and the potential loss of capability incurred by disclosure. When we say "loss of capability", in this case it may mean disclosing the capability to detect missile launches early, which represents a critical piece of US missile defense.
For a historical case study in this type of calculus, it's worth looking into the disclosure of images during the Cuban Missile crisis. There, the US had to provide credible information that there was a threat in Cuba, and did so at the cost of the revelation of U-2 images.
By the way, this same calculus played into the US President's wording when he spoke yesterday about the tragedy. Obama was careful to say little about how they knew where the missile came from.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of an intelligence agency, NDAs are insufficient to protect classified assets, especially where multinationals are involved. Anything that is disclosed would go through several levels of indirection, and would probably end up in a NOTAM (like the one prohibiting flight under FL320 in the region).
The ceiling of the exclusion zone was 32,000 feet. The plane was flying at 33,000 feet. Pilots like to maintain significant buffers. As a pilot, I would be very uncomfortable with 1000 feet of buffer. If an incident occurs that requires manoeuvring, e.g. a mechanical incident, 1000 feet is very little room.
P.S. I'm not speaking to the accuracy of the numbers cited. They are what I heard the person say.
I personally believe we, as people, will never know the truth as to who did it - was it Ukrainians or the rebels or the Russians. However, this is the direct result of the existence of states and governments. We are taxed to build weapons and go to war for some private and corporate interests we have nothing in common with. Those weapons were built for our money. If each and every person was asked separately "would you like to give us 10% of your income to build these deadly weapons and support the rebels in Ukraine or would you like to keep this money for your family" nobody would give it away voluntarily. Taxation and states are at the root of this evil and it is at moments like these that I can see it as clear as ever.
There are always going to be people who want to form organizations, leadership cabals, and have control over things. Even areas already under the control of a strong Government still have corporations, criminal gangs, and various types of civil organizations, all vying for a little bit of that control pie.
Essentially, there will always be some sort of government. It can be a single one that's powerful enough to be unquestionably dominant over anything it chooses to touch, or it can be dozens of little ones, all vying for control over various things in various places. That essentially looks like Somalia or Syria or Libya - total chaos, with constant risk of offending one warlord or another or some gang of bandits, and none of them will make the slightest pretense of listening to you. Avoiding that requires having one government with enough power to squash anybody like that. The best we can get is to have one dominant government, set up in such a way that it has some degree of obligation to listen to the population.
One powerful government per country might not be perfect, but so far, it seems to be better than anything anyone else has some up with. The alternative is not some imaginary perfect government, but a lot of little competing governments/militias that probably pay even less attention to what anybody not a member of them wants.
The problem with one powerful government per country is that different countries still have different powers and they like to meddle with weak ones, like US and Russia did in this case.
You think that would resolve everything hey ? Don't you think one dominant government would actually have no incentive to listen to the population and could impose its right by might alone ?
European history is an excellent case study in the fall of dominant rulers who failed to satisfy their subjects.
Uniting all world governments into a single state scares the hell out of me, and I think it could very well be the worst idea, but suggesting China as a pattern is the icing on the cake, quite frankly.
Is this really disputed? There are people with agendas trying to spin it one way or the other, but given that the rebels initially claimed responsibility for it, and the fact the Russians probably wouldn't make this mistake (it's easy to check if something is a commercial aircraft), it looks almost certain it was the rebels mistaking the airliner for a military plane.
>After 9 Days, Ukraine Says Its Missile Hit A Russian Jet
Earlier today, Ukraine's military had taken responsibility after nine days of increasingly vaporous denials.
Seventy-eight people, most of them Russian émigrés to Israel, died when the Siberian Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk exploded and plunged 35,000 feet into the sea off the Russian coast. Four minutes earlier, a Ukrainian air defense exercise fired two long-range antiaircraft missiles at a drone off the Black Sea's Crimean coast.
Russian investigators concluded on Friday that one of the missiles, an S-300, struck the drone, but that the second, an S-200, flew 150 more miles and unleashed a warhead of shrapnel balls at the airliner. /
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/world/after-9-days-ukraine...
There are plenty of pilots who ejected after being hit by SAMs in the Gulf War, and they were flying planes much smaller than an airliner. I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the state of the wreckage just yet.
Also, I'm not certain, it's just none of the other possibilities are particularly credible.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2696389/That-blast-l...
Your credibility among most intellectual people sits somewhere around "none".
The general notion is that these were people operating a weapon system they had limited knowledge of, and motivated by their success the day earlier were a little trigger happy. And FWIW, most weapon systems do not tell you what kind of aircraft you're pointing at (this isn't the movies). Recall the USS Vincennes, with the most advanced fire control system in the world at the time (certainly far more advanced than this unit), shooting down an Iranian jetliner that was ascending and squawking civilian airliner transponder codes.
I would find a study of the brains of conspiracy fanatics fascinating. There is something fundamentally broken there.
I disagree. There's a very promising international investigation being planned, and they have an excellent track record of success.
People are looting personal items and 'evidence' [1]
The rebels are blocking access to the investigation [2]
The rebel commander has fired warning shots at investigators [2]
Now I ask you again, do you really think they will be successful this time?
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/heartless-looters-raid...
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/mh17-crash-pro-...
Tabloids are having a field day with claims of looting and corpses left to rot as a "final insult to the dead". Yet there has been no video of looters stuffing Euros into their pockets, despite the presence of 24/7 camera crews. Meanwhile others reporters are confirming that bodies are being recovered and sent to the morgue. So who is right?
Another contradiction are claims that "We have compelling evidence that THEY did it" yet at the same time there are headlines saying "THEY'RE destroying the evidence". So which is it? You either have the evidence or you don't, right?
What is reported as "fact" is so often just conjecture, opinion or simply made up, either to support a political narrative or boost ratings. Media reporting should have no bearing on an official investigation, but of course, they will have a huge influence in the court of public opinion.
The media are so desperate to get their ratings up, they'll literally let anybody have their say. Look how MSNBC got punked on the day of the crash:
The political damage to the opponent would be of far more real-world value than any possible impact from revealing one's technical ability, which the other side had probably already guessed or been made aware of.
We already know the plane was shot down, and determining who shot it down doesn't hang in the balance of getting access to the crash site.
Taxation also does a lot of positive things. Your logic is filled with false conclusions. What do you propose instead of taxation and states?
The alternative is free market and free enterprise, of course. I don't propose it though. I know people are very stubborn with the old ways. My only hope is that we are going to see no-state and free market in some places on earth and when people are going to see it's good, they're gonna copy that.
We still don't have any idea what happened to that flight 370, either.
I don't think this will help them, though. I sure wouldn't buy any stock in anything connected to them. Even if nothing about either crash was their fault in any reasonable way, people remember stuff like that.
With that said, the Buk was also designed to surpass its predecessor('Kub') by incorporating a fire control radar into each launcher (TELAR vs TEL), so that it could operate with some autonomy. The original idea was to allow the whole SAM network to track multiple targets independent of the 9S18M1 radar, which would focus on detection and delegation.
This capability also enables an autonomous TELAR unit (as the various images and videos are showing) to target an aircraft at a range of 3-32km, much as people are hypothesizing happened to MH17. It is plausible, although far from certain.
I'm not 100% solid on this, but I have read that they were using just the missile truck without the supporting air-search radar. The missile trucks apparently have fire-control radar and can attack and aircraft by themselves. It seems plausible that they were given or stole just part of the system - the missile truck - and maybe got some manuals or some hasty training from Russian military or something. So they know enough to fire the missiles at a target, but don't have the hardware or training to operate a proper air-search radar and identify their targets carefully first.
Which is why I think it's mostly likely that it was them. Say what you will about the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, I doubt they'd accidentally shoot down a civilian airliner.
The simplest research would have told Malaysia Airlines that (a) rebels were shooting down planes in Eastern Ukraine with surface to air missiles; and (b) some surface to air missiles can reach 40,000 feet. Those two facts alone indicate that the region was not safe for commercial airliners.
If all airlines flew through Eastern Ukraine then they are all guilty of abdicating their responsibility to make simple checks about the safety of their flights.
It is not acceptable to say that air traffic authorised the flight. In the cockpit the co-pilot is trained to question the judgement of the pilot. In the same way Malaysia Airlines should have performed simple checks on the information supplied by the air traffic authorities.
And even the most well-trained military force in the world has shown that it can mistakenly target civilian planes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
This sounds like a good reason to buy stock in them.
Looks pretty heavily trafficked to me. And a lot of airlines are now saying that they will avoid that area, when they were presumably using it before.
Given that Air France-KLM is a one corporation since 2004, it's pretty surprising. Paris is a bit more south than Amsterdam, but not that much.
[1] http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-726710-galleryV9-ocpi.jp...
I don't know if "most" is true, but Air France and British Airways were avoiding it at least, and I recall reading Delta had been as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/downing-of-pl...
I would've posted this link had I seen it earlier...but it is interesting to see how the OP, a pilot himself, thinks MH17 didn't have much cause to change its route. I mean, the OP even acknowledges that the Malaysian Air pilots would've known about the Ukranian cargo plane that was shot down earlier that day...in the NYT news report linked above, the 32,000-ft-restricted altitude left planes exposed to rockets that could strike at twice that height.
In such an environment it seems naive for an airlines to not include the safety of the flight path in their calculations. If all civilian flights below 32K feet are forbidden by the Ukrainian authorities, that doesn't automatically mean that flying just 1000 feet above would be safe. Also while other airlines are guilty of flying over war zones too, that doesn't mean Malaysian airlines is not.
There is Eurocontrol which apparently hadn't advised before the incident to avoid the airspace in question.
In aviation, you have to manage risks, you cannot avoid them entirely. For example, there are different levels of redundancy, depending on how critical a system is. There may be two, three or maybe four units, but there surely aren't 25 units of even the most critical equipment - the plane would be too heavy to take off. At some point, you have to decide what the acceptable risk is, and go with that. I think your argument has a strong hindsight bias.
I believe the ICAO is this regulatory agency.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there should be definitely increased public pressure on airlines to include flight safety in their calculations. Or atleast not fly over active war zones..
All rules bodies can do is make rules based on the best available information. Their information was wrong, but it's not like they didn't try.
> After each crash, disaster or terrorist episode, it is natural to point fingers and say, Why didn’t we foresee that specific threat? Thus one attempted shoe bombing leads to a decade of shoes-off orders in security lines. The truth is that air transportation, like most other modern systems, could not operate if it fortified itself against every conceivable peril.
Many people like to use phrases like "one $INCIDENT is one too many". In reality, all of life is about balancing and mitigating risks. Just because a single failure happened in one case doesn't mean the entire system is faulty; given enough time, any system that is not 100% foolproof (that is, all of them) is going to have a failure. The question is whether it is actually feasible and/or reasonable to prevent those.
That could just be the usual British "better safe than sorry" mentality, but I suspect they were perhaps given intelligence that suggested unstable rebels had access to SAMs.
Couple this with some reports that the plane was escorted by Ukrainian fighter jets at some point and it stops looking as a clear cut "stupid rebel monkey" case. After all Ukraine has much more to gain from this incident if it blamed on rebels/Russians. They also got the US keenly interested in the whole mess, offering a wealth of experience in steering geo-politically important conflicts the "right way", so this could very well be a staged provaction.
I am sure those reports are really credible, right? Care to provide an authoritative source on that?
http://www.themalaymailonline.com/malaysia/article/ukraine-t... - they were instructed by Ukrainians to fly at 33,000 ft instead of requested 35,000 ft
http://en.itar-tass.com/russia/741248 - the warplane escort. The original tweet was removed, but here's a copy - http://i.imgur.com/8YILn3x.png
click on other dates and keep an eye on the flight path
You mean that the flight path changed significantly every single day? What does that prove? You do understand that flight paths are set based upon weather, air currents, etc?
As to 33,000 versus 35,000 -- so? What does that prove? The SAM could hit up to 70,000 feet and beyond. That proves utterly nothing.
As to the "Spanish air controller" -- people referring to an anonymous twitter source is simply incredible.
One of the videos that is supposed to prove that the airliner was shot down by pro Russian rebels is one day older than the incident according to the meta data:
https://twitter.com/ofehr_en/status/490039740595707904/photo...
The truth probably is that a major propaganda war is under way and we simply do not know (maybe never will know) who is directly to blame for the incident.
1: https://gist.github.com/klaufir/d1e694c064322a7fbc15
2: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2b4kpg/conspira...
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This is a systems bug based on an underestimation of a technical bug, i.e. that flying 1,000 feet over a 32,000 feet restricted altitude was considered "safe" given the hardware used. Such an assumption ended up being wrong. OTOH, the OP makes the point that diverting flights isn't as simply as moving the joystick in a different direction, given the nature of crowded airspace and routes. It's also interesting to note, as the OP does, that flights at lower altitudes were routinely conducted over Afghanistan and Iraq.
I actually think the OP is overstating his case though...but I posted it here because I know there are flight enthusiasts who care about the details, such as whether 1,000 ft. above a restricted altitude is not much more reckless than speeding 63 mph over 65.
HN will be a sad place if it concerns itself only with bugs in pure logic, and not all the bugs and misunderstandings of details and mechanics that exist outside of software code.