Was It An Accident?
While it is too early to know who shot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 over Ukraine yesterday, it would be good to remember that airlines have accidentally been shot down numerous times in the past.
After all, the Malaysian airlines plane was way off course:
The plane flew over a war zone, which was well-known to be a “no fly zone” with “restricted airspace”.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was cruising just 1,000 feet above restricted airspace when it was struck by a missile in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, according to aviation and intelligence officials.
Despite ongoing violence in eastern Ukraine, including the recent downing of two military aircraft, Ukrainian aviation officials had closed the region’s airspace only below 32,000 feet in altitude.
The Boeing 777, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, with 298 people aboard, was at 33,000 feet when it vanished from radar screens, according to European aviation authorities.
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In recent days, though, military aircraft were downed by antiaircraft munitions, which should have concerned aviation authorities, he said.
Reuters notes:
Malaysia Airlines filed a flight plan requesting to fly at 35,000 feet throughout Ukraine airspace but was instructed by Ukraine air traffic control to fly at 33,000 feet upon entry ….
CBS writes in an article entitled “‘Big Question’ Is Why Plane Was Flying Over War Zone”:
During a phone interview with CBS News Thursday morning, Captain Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was questioned why Malaysia Airlines flight 17 would be flying over Ukraine’s border with Russia despite ongoing political unrest in the area.
Sullenberger, the veteran of the 2009 Miracle on the Hudson landing, is an aviation expert for CBS News….
“That is one of the big questions right now,” said Sully. “The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has barred U.S. Airlines from flying over this area for some time.”
The Atlantic points out:
Did aviation authorities know that this was a dangerous area?
Yes, they most certainly did. Nearly three months ago, on the “Special Rules” section of its site, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration put out an order prohibiting American pilots, airlines, charter carriers, and everyone else over whom the FAA has direct jurisdiction, from flying over parts of Ukraine.
Bloomberg adds:
Qantas hasn’t used the route for a few months, said Andrew McGinnes, a spokesman for the Australian carrier, while Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific said it has been detouring for “quite some time.” Korean Air Lines Co. and Asiana Airlines Inc. said in statements they have been avoiding the area since March 3.
This is not the first time such an incident has occurred …
Numerous Previous Accidental Shootdowns … By Russia, Ukraine, and Other Countries
In 1954, mainland China’s Army shot down a Cathay Pacific Airways airplane, killing 10 out of the 19 passengers. Cathay Pacific was the airline of Hong Kong, then under British control). In apologizing for the attack to Britain, the Chinese government said that they had thought the plane was a military aircraft from the Taiwan on an attack mission.
In 1973, a Libyan Arab Airlines Boeing 727 flying from Tripoli to Cairo got lost and flew over the Sinai peninsula, under Israeli control since the Six-Day War in 1967. After giving signals to land and firing warning shots, Israeli jets shot down the plane, killing 108 of the 113 people on board. The chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces took responsibility for ordering the shoot-down, the Defense Minister called the event an “error of judgment”, and the Israeli government compensated the families of victims (Libya condemned the attack as “a criminal act” while the Soviets called it a “monstrous new crime”).
In 1983, a Korean airlines passenger airline was shot down by a Soviet pilot killing all 269 passengers. The pilot had accidentally deviated from the normal flight path:
The Soviets believed it was likely a military aircraft. Transcripts quote the shootdown order from Soviet General Kornukov:
What civilian? [It] has flown over Kamchatka! It [came] from the ocean without identification. I am giving the order to attack if it crosses the State border.
The Washington Post reported in 1988:
A U.S. warship fighting gunboats in the Persian Gulf yesterday mistook an Iranian civilian jetliner for an attacking Iranian F14 fighter plane and blew it out of the hazy sky with a heat-seeking missile, the Pentagon announced. Iran said 290 persons were aboard the European-made A300 Airbus and that all had perished.
“The U.S. government deeply regrets this incident,” Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon news conference.
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Navy officials said the Vincennes’ combat teams believed the airliner to be an Iranian F14 jet fighter.
Ukraine admitted to accidentally shooting down a Russian airliner in 2001, killing all 78 on board as the aircraft plunged into the Black Sea:
Ukraine finally admitted yesterday that its military shot down a Russian airliner that crashed into the Black Sea last week, killing all 78 passengers and crew.
Evhen Marchuk, the chairman of Ukraine’s security council, conceded that the plane had probably been brought down by “an accidental hit from an S-200 rocket fired during exercises”.
And – according to several government investigators tasked with determining what happened – an American missile test which went astray may have accidentally brought down TWA 800, killing all 230 on board.
U.S. Government Lied to Pretend that Accidental Russian Shootdown of Commercial Plane Was Intentional … Three Decades Ago
Posted on July 19, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog
The U.S. Has Previously Carried Out a Major Disinformation Campaign to Malign Russia
We noted yesterday that Ukraine, Russia, the U.S., Israel and China have all accidentally shot down commercial airplanes.
Ray McGovern – a 27-year CIA veteran, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, their vice presidents, secretaries of state, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many other senior government officials – provides vital details on an accidental shootdown by Russia – and America’s disinformation campaign to make it look intentional – 3 decades ago:
The U.S. press might pause to recall how it’s been manipulated by the U.S. government in the past, including three decades ago by the Reagan administration twisting the facts of the KAL-007 tragedy.
In that case, a Soviet fighter jet shot down a Korean Air Line plane on Sept. 1, 1983, after it strayed hundreds of miles off course and penetrated some of the Soviet Union’s most sensitive airspace over military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island.
Over Sakhalin, KAL-007 was finally intercepted by a Soviet Sukhoi-15 fighter. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots did not respond to the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane’s identity — a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier — Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire. He did, blasting the plane out of the sky and killing all 269 people on board.
The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder ….
But a Soviet admission of a tragic blunder regarding KAL-007 wasn’t good enough for the Reagan administration, which saw the incident as a propaganda windfall. At the time, the felt imperative in Washington was to blacken the Soviet Union in the cause of Cold War propaganda and to escalate tensions with Moscow.
Falsifying the Case
To make the very blackest case against Moscow, the Reagan administration suppressed the exculpatory evidence from the U.S. electronic intercepts. The U.S. mantra became “the deliberate downing of a civilian passenger plane.” Newsweek ran a cover emblazoned with the headline “Murder in the Sky.”
“The Reagan administration’s spin machine began cranking up,” wrote Alvin A. Snyder, then-director of the U.S. Information Agency’s television and film division, in his 1995 book, Warriors of Disinformation.
USIA Director Charles Z. Wick “ordered his top agency aides to form a special task force to devise ways of playing the story overseas. The objective, quite simply, was to heap as much abuse on the Soviet Union as possible,” Snyder recalled.
Snyder noted that “the American media swallowed the U.S. government line without reservation. Said the venerable Ted Koppel on the ABC News ‘Nightline’ program: ‘This has been one of those occasions when there is very little difference between what is churned out by the U.S. government propaganda organs and by the commercial broadcasting networks.’”
On Sept. 6, 1983, the Reagan administration went so far as to present a doctored transcript of the intercepts to the United Nations Security Council (a prelude to a similar false presentation two decades later by Secretary of State Colin Powell on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction).
“The tape was supposed to run 50 minutes,” Snyder said about recorded Soviet intercepts. “But the tape segment we [at USIA] had ran only eight minutes and 32 seconds. … ‘Do I detect the fine hand of [Richard Nixon’s secretary] Rosemary Woods here?’ I asked sarcastically.’”
But Snyder had a job to do: producing the video that his superiors wanted. “The perception we wanted to convey was that the Soviet Union had cold-bloodedly carried out a barbaric act,” Snyder wrote.
Only a decade later, when Snyder saw the complete transcripts — including the portions that the Reagan administration had hidden — would he fully realize how many of the central elements of the U.S. presentation were false.
The Soviet fighter pilot apparently did believe he was pursuing a U.S. spy plane, according to the intercepts, and he was having trouble in the dark identifying the plane. At the instructions of Soviet ground controllers, the pilot had circled the KAL airliner and tilted his wings to force the aircraft down. The pilot said he fired warning shots, too. “This comment was also not on the tape we were provided,” Snyder wrote.
It was clear to Snyder that in the pursuit of its Cold War aims, the Reagan administration had presented false accusations to the United Nations, as well as to the people of the United States and the world. To these Republicans, the ends of smearing the Soviets had justified the means of falsifying the historical record.
In his book, Snyder acknowledged his role in the deception and drew an ironic lesson from the incident. The senior USIA official wrote, “The moral of the story is that all governments, including our own, lie when it suits their purposes. The key is to lie first.”
The Malaysian Airlines dual tragedy strains credulity, but let’s pretend it’s just a statistical fluke.
Anyone with a map of the world can see that the shortest distance between two point (particularly when you’re talking air travel) is a straight line. Go on, get a map of the world, locate Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur and draw that line.
Why an aircraft from a financially troubled air;line already stinging from an unsolved disaster would intentionally divert a flight over contested airspace where aircraft have been shot down in recent days, at the additional expense of fuel is beyond credulity.
Was it an accident? Intentional? Russians? Ukies? Someone else? Couldn’t say, wouldn’t venture to guess, but why not one single person has asked the question as to why that plane was in that airspace at this time raises questions of its own that add rather than detract from the mystery.
Why Airplanes Don’t Always Fly in Straight Lines to Their Destination
Harper | February 23, 2010 at 11:15 pm
As a Geography teacher, I must also point out that the arc pattern that most planes fly is related to the fact that the earth is fatter closer to the equator, so flying in an arc closer to the poles is actually a shorter flight path than flying over the fatter part of the earth. This is why you fly awfully close to Greenland on the way from the East coast of North America to Western Europe or the UK. Even though it would appear as though the shortest route would be a straight line, it’s actually not. The shortest route is an arc.
Why do airplanes not travel in a straight line?
billp_seattle answered 8 years ago
On those Airline travel maps you are looking at I am sure the routes going North/South look like straight lines, only the East/West routes appear to curve. The issue is with the map. Your question really gets to the choices map makers have to make, the challenge all maps of the Earth have is that they are trying to represent a sphere (or an ellipsoid, the Earth actually bulges at the equator) on a flat piece of paper. Most maps are Mercator Projections which distort the northern and southern latitudes, with out seeing the travel map you are looking at I would guess that it is a Mercator Projection.
Do this experiment yourself – you’ll need a globe, a World map and a piece of string. On the globe stretch the piece of string between Seattle and Amsterdam, notice the shortest route takes you over Canada and Greenland, north of both your starting and ending point. When you do the same thing on the World map you’ll notice that your string is nearly following the lines latitude across the northern United States and the North Pacific, a much longer route.
You can then exaggerate the difference by looking at Seattle to Moscow. The direct route on the globe will take you over the artic, on the map this doesn’t even look possible.
http://www.worldatlas.com/travelaids/flight_distance.htm
I misspoke.
I was, however, correct.
HF
That worldatlas.com map is very misleading.
Go to Google Earth and draw a line from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and you will get very different result. You will see that the most direct flight path runs right along the border between Ukraine and Russia.
In wars BAD shit happens. Maybe it was an accident. I don`t think we will ever know. The history will be written by the victor.
Russian Radars Record Active Operation of Ukrainian Air Defense
Pravda.ru
July 19, 2014
Russian radio equipment recorded a radar station of the Ukrainian anti-aircraft missile system Buk was active on the day the Malaysian airliner crashed, officials with the Russian Defense Ministry said. The part of the route of the Malaysian jet, as well as a place of its crash, fall into the destruction area of two Ukrainian batteries of long-range anti-aircraft missile S-200 and three batteries of medium-range SAM Buk-M1.
Spokespeople for the Defense Ministry clarified that the Russian aero-technical equipment recorded active operations of radar station RLS-9s18 “Dome” of a battery of SAM Buk-M1, stationed near the village of Styla (30 kilometers south of Donetsk).
Officials also said that technical features of SAM Buk-M1 allow to exchange information on air targets between batteries of one division.
“THUS, THE LAUNCH OF MISSILES COULD BE CONDUCTED FROM ALL BATTERIES STATIONED IN THE VILLAGE OF AVDIYIVKA (8 KILOMETERS NORTH OF DONETSK) OR GRUZSKO-ZARYANSKOE (25 KILOMETERS EAST OF DONETSK),” concluded the Defense Ministry.