cable news claims the rebels are threatening to shell the crash site to keep investigators away.

russian terrorists previously reported about an26 down by them, but....there was no an26 there. crash site is under control of terrorists, so black boxes and debris shall be transfered to Russia.
MH17 was flying to TAMAK, 20 seconds before disappearing from radars got shortcut to some point in Rostov's zone.

How much of the Middle East, Africa, and other locales in the World would that close to air traffic?

Care to post a Map with all the places that would qualify?

TSA scanning your inner organs yet planes are allowed to fly over warzones

logic of todays world

Two Headed Troll:

Your description of what happened to Panam 103 is completely wrong. The complete nose section forward of door 1 broke off and the aircraft then fell in several large parts from cruising altitude.

Re:hindsight
 

Fireflybob, I think maybe your comment was removed, however -

re: hindsight - this has not come out of the blue. Far from it. Aircraft after aircraft has been shot down in Ukrainian airspace - the airlines decided it was business as usual despite those undisputed facts.

It's not a question of hindsight - there needs to be an inquiry into how commercial airliners have been allowed to continue to operate in an active war zone.

Ukrainians and Buk
 

As far as I can remember the Tu-22 shot down over Georgia in August '08 was shot by a Buk system imported from Ukraine and manned by Ukrainians...
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1e3_1376422916:confused:

Flight crews now have another unfortunate example upon which to refer when insisting on the safest flight plan routing possible. The CEO must be held responsible for allowing the bean counters to dictate to the flight operations department to choose the least expensive route instead of the safest. Another glaring example of putting profit before safety. Heads should roll and shame should be directed at those responsible for this absurd example of risk management.

ABC News also says that the "rebels" have the black box(es) and will turn them over only to the Russians

If black boxes are handed over to the Russians in theory (!!!) they should send them to Kiev, as the crash site is clearly within Ukrainian boundaries. In a (most possibly) political case like this I guess a close cooperation of Russian and Ukrainian officials would result in the most trustworthy report, but I'm afraid that's (very) naive thinking...

As one of those parties is most certainly directly or indirectly involved in the crime - no way.

Medium/heavy surface to air missiles rarely 'hit' their target they are made to explode on proximity in a way that will destroy any target that is close. Often the warhead is surrounded by spun heavy grade wire that explodes outward to give maximum chance of destroying the target.

I fly SIA Heathrow-Changi a couple of times a year and the route takes you straight over the top of Afghansitan and has done since the Afghan business started. It's always been a bit of a bum clencher for me. It also flies very close to the Crimea. I'm off again in a couple of weeks, oh joy. There's a bloody great big NOTAM out in the FIR bit about avoiding Ukraine airspace as well.

Network Manager?
 

airspace closures just announced! but too late for the poor unfortunates and their families. Where was the coordinated risk assessment for issues like hostilities?

Surely NM have a duty of care to arrange and coordinate such joint and then to manage flows accordingly?

network manager?
 

looks like the NM is closing the airspace to civil A/C - at least that's what i think i heard on bbc. Shame they didn't trigger and coordinate a risk assessment at the start of the conflict - and subsequently

The Huffingtonpost has some graphic images of the crash site.

Link below:

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 Crash Site Revealed In First Graphic Pictures

The disposition and fragmentation of the wreckage strongly suggests a high-altitude SAM system.

It supports a high altitude breakup of some kind, although SPECULATION is SAM take down... none of this is proven yet.

Normal within the Eurocontrol zone.
There are even Ukrainian controllers in Maastricht UAC from time to time as part of exchange programmes.

I think that the facts will be very clearly established over the coming days.

For a start, that region has good radar coverage.

Secondly, it's under massively scrutiny from the rest of the world. I bet the US could tell you what each Russian separatist had alone for breakfast this morning, let alone if they were acquiring and firing Soviet surface-to-air missiles.

This is what the CIA lives for. They'll know all the Russian missile signature like the back of their hands. It wouldn't surprise me if they had good enough imagery to determine which finger the firer used to press the 'launch' button.

That of course is only relevant IF a missile were involved.

My guess is that intelligence in Russia as well as in the US have a pretty clear picture of what happened, as this area of the world should be under pretty close observation from "above".