PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Ukrainian Aircraft down in Iran
View Single Post
Old 10th Jan 2020, 00:05
  #300 (permalink)  
Profit Max
 
Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: BRU
Posts: 68
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
I did my own geolocation of the video and found the same (didn't refresh for a while so I didn't see comments - good to have independent confirmation). Video was shot from here: 35.489223, 50.906857, and the explosion happened in North-West to North-North-Westerly direction.

According to my estimates, the sound of the explosion arrives 10.8 seconds after the flash, which means the video was shot from around 3.7 km away from the explosion. Last known altitude from flightradar24 is 7925 feet. Ground altitude is around 1.1 km. So with some trigonometry, we find that the ground distance from the point where the video was taken is around 3.5 km. With the location of the person taking the video and the line of sight, the explosion happens roughly in this area: 35.5161, 50.9287

However, it appears, the aircraft travelled around 17 seconds between the last ADS-B transmission and the time of being hit by the missile based on the intersection of the presumed flight path and the line of sight from the video. Altitude would then have been approximately 800 feet higher, so ground distance from person taking video would only have been 3.3 km, putting the revised location of the explosion in this area: 35.5140, 50.9263. The angular altitude of the explosion as seen from the position of where the video was taken would then be around 25°, which seems to be consistent with the video (but someone should check this in detail).

Working assumption for the reason of the missing 17 seconds would be that there were two missiles launched (as suggested by the intelligence from the US). The first missile was launched at took out ADS-B and radio at least. The explosion is heard and the person turns on the video camera just in time to catch the second missile hit the plane.

Profit Max is offline