From Crimea, or from the abandoned Ukraine bases in the East? I thought that was (vaguely) proved?

I seriously doubt Putin would have been stupid and imported them from Mother Russia.

One good reason for recovering it from the scene of the crime so that nobody knows, of course ... unless that was the Separatists trying to hide the evidence of their crime.

The system may have been Ukranian originally, but has been removed to hide evidence of Russian servicing/repairs which may have been carried out, and to hide the fact that the rebels ever had it. There were claims by the rebels that such servicing was expected, and that they had such systems which was then denied after the shootdown.

To " A Van"
 

Thank you for pointing this out. I can confirm, that since Russia and the Ukraine used to have the same military tools not too long ago, they still do now. So whatever Russian (Soviet) weaponry used by Ukranians, this is not recently smuggled - they've always had it.
Secondly, Russia would not have any interest in shooting down a commercial plane. The Korean ones in the 70s and 80s had tresspassed a no-fly zone, this is a (sad) different story.
I'm shocked how the media are jumping to Hollywood-style movie teasers, we are just missing Schwarzenegger and Co. to be the heros of a cold-war movie!
People, firstly this is a tragedy, as human lives have been lost. Secondly, just because you are filled with anti-Russian thoughts, do not use it as a scapegoat for everything and anything. Only when and if there is true evidence, then you may speak.

released today

UK C4 News footage: Buk launcher minus 2 missiles
 

This evening C4 News (consistently one of the best) showed what appeared to be covert but clear cellphone video footage of one of the Buk launchers, minus 2 of its complement of missiles. The commentary said that it was filmed heading out of Ukraine toward the Russian border. Somehow this had a quality of authenticity about it - get the evidence out of the area quickly.

A slightly more credible input, albeit from POTUS ... http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...d23_story.html

Purported footage of Buk (Gadfly?) being transported
 

Here is a link to the Channel 4 article with two videos of a BUK being transported (referenced elsewhere in this thread):

http://www.channel4.com/news/did-rus...hoot-down-mh17

You'd assume there would be a fair few Academi/Greystone boys on the ground around there, just wonder if they're contracted to the US or the Ukrainian government?

Originally posted by MPN11:Ehhh, Putin is Russian. I think you have a few things mixed up here.

For the rest, I have to agree with Frequent_Flyer and A_Van.

The anti-Russian sentiment here is mind boggling. Are professional pilots so easily brainwashed into jumping to conclusions?

When there's a 'regular' airplane crash, people here fall over each other to "wait for the investigation to be complete" but when politics is involved it seems to be quite okay to 'shoot from the hips' and 'take no prisoners.'

Perhaps rideforever's remarks were a bit tongue in cheek, but why is the US main stream media so determined to point the finger towards Russia? Watching CNN nowadays is absolutely sickening and it IMHO very little to do anymore with objective and investigative journalism.

The main stream media brainwashing has been going on for quite some time, starting with the hype about Putin's anti-gay laws, the arrest of Pussy Riot, the Sochy Olympic Games and now the Ukraine.

It seems like everybody is taking the bait, like good obedient slaves, in order to relaunch the good ol' Cold War.

Let's please stick to the facts and leave politics out of it. Remember:

People need to calm down. This is more like criminal negligence than an act of war, and the response needs to be on that level.

Like most disasters, this is most likely the result of an accumulation of unrelated but serious mistakes by multiple parties. The obvious culprits are the Kremlin, for not understanding the risks of having sophisticated weaponry like this in the hands of irregulars, and the ICAO, for allowing civil aviation anywhere near that area.

COMMERCIAL GREED STRIKES AGAIN?
 

SOME airlines took the cautious and financially disadvantageous decision to fly AROUND the allegedly promulgated hazard area weeks ago, before the cargo shootdowns.

SOME airlines, including MH, decided it was an acceptable risk to overfly by 1,000ft, the 32,000ft "lid" atop a hot war zone in order to maximise profits.

Commercial pressure again a contributary cause of a major fatal civil hull loss, but not much about WHY MH17 was flight-planned on such a track?

I doubt if the (allegedly heavy) crew were totally aware of the risk at briefing, bearing in mind the much complained about inadequate reporting times pre-flight and the difficulty of picking out the wheat from all the chaff in modern briefing material and its presentation.

I trust the MH management and flight planning staff can sleep easy in their beds, aware of the consequences of this decision.

And how many of the other airlines who callously sent their crews through this wasps' nest are breathing a sigh of relief it wasn't THEIR beancounting habits which dropped them in it?

Whilst we speculate about missiles, WW3, Vincennes et al, let's just remember the routeing was a normal COMMERCIAL decision which contributed to this awful tragedy.

What part of the word HAZARD does modern airline management NOT understand?! :ugh:

- remember the 'lid' WAS 24,000' with a 33% buffer. It has probably changed...................

Bokkenrijder - you used the word 'regular'. Well that sums it up doesn't it. This is highly irregular.

Get this into your head. A peaceful, civilian plane is proceeding about it's normal, lawful business and is shot from the sky. Separatist rebels in the Ukraine claim to have shot down an AN26 at the same time.

Realisation dawns and they remove any references to the downing from their sites (which they do use A_Van and you know it).

A Buk launcher has been seen in the locality from where the missile was fired. Look back on this thread, there are pictures, one from a reputable news agency AP), also video. Today a Buk launcher, minus at least one missile, is seen being driven from the vicinity towards the Russian border along a route Russians have used before. See my earlier post.

The Russians have been providing the rebels with MANPADS and other weapons and only yesterday a Grad attack on Ukraine has been determined to have been launched from Russia.

There are a couple of options here. The Ukraine authorities have cobbled together a marvellous deception which has fooled not only me and my sources in Ukraine but intelligence agencies.

The other option is that all the available evidence point to the Russians.

Does that answer your question?

BOAC - it has changed. the airspace is now closed

hf40 - yes, I didn't bother with the smilie as I thought it not appropriate in the circumstances. I was just making the point that 330 over that area was not OBVIOUSLY stupid as some have implied. I come back to my original point that it was essentially an 'intelligence' failure here. Several int bodies would have known the SA11 was 'loose' and should have reacted. LH, MH and several others did not know, I guess.

Barking Mad, I agree with your comments.

But to an extent is this also an indication of the "dumbing down" of the authority of the aircraft commander?

Decades ago the Captain would have said "There's no f*****g way I'm taking my a/c on that route" and ordered a refile and it would have been done without question. These days Captains with some companies are aware of the fact that a "witch hunt" by management might follow and feel reluctant to rock the boat.

Don't get me wrong am not saying that's the case with all companies or even this one but over the last few decades I see crews being "given" less authority but they still have the ultimate responsibility.

as far as I'm aware SQ, EK, TG, LH, CA, EY were all using the corridor up until yesterday.

Just when you think this disaster cannot get any worse or more bizarre.

AOL.com Article - Rebel leader gives bizarre account of plane crash

With a lie of this magnitude, any doubt about the Ukrainian rebels shooting down MH17 has been removed.

Ah, US intelligence says.

Must be true, then.

It doesn't really matter whodunnit. The facts are that Russia & The West are fighting a proxy war in East Ukraine, in the midst of which an airliner full of civilians has been shot down. If we're not careful, we'll all fingerwag our way into WWIII.

Here is a video showing how an engagement looks like for operators of a Buk-M1 Launcher:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSXMhaFntrU

At 1.19 we see the operator's consoles, horizontal situation being displayed on the larger, circular orange display. I'm not sure what the right retangular orange display is for - vertical situation, precise target tracking, missile tracking ?
There is also a green oscilloscop-like display - not sure what it does, and a TV display for targeting using a visual channel.

From 1.24 to 1.29 we see a target engagement on the circular display - first the radar is scanning wide 120deg horizontal sector (7deg in elevation), we see a blip of a target detected. As the target is selected, the scanning is quickly reduced to 10deg zone, and just after that - target is locked on and the beam is tracking it.

All this looks quite "analog" - no syntetic situation display with computer generated target markers tagged with speed and altitude data - only analog "blips" on radar, the range is determined by the radar display grid, the speed - probably by the rate of movement on the display, and the altitude of the target - well, I have no idea if it's displayed anywhere ? Maybe after the target is locked on, some numerical or at least analog data about speed, course and altitude is calculated and displayed... somwhere....

The target detection, identification and selection is usually done by the battery's command center vehicle (which have data from the big search radar, with digital displays and syntetic computer-generated target symbols on them) - operators in command center would easily see difference between Su-25, An-26 or a B777 crusing at 33k. The radar on the TELAR Buk launcher vehicle is a simple one, used mainly for for locking on target, tracking and illlumination. It does have some target detection capability, but is very simple and gives little data about the targets - they are just "blips".
A calm and experienced operator could probably say the target is too high to be a Su-25 or An-26, but an inexperienced one in a rush ? I imagine that with such displays they could easily lock-on the MH17 thinking it's a lower flying ukrainian plane. Target speed, size or altitude just doesn't show on those displays, or this kind of data is not easily accesible and interpreted.

Didn't they know there is a commercial passenger traffic high overheads ? They could see the contrails with their naked eye.... Maybe the operators just arrived at the scene (with the vehicle) and just didn't happen to think about it.... That capabilities of their SAM system reaches to heights of civilian traffic and they can detect/engage a civilian plane mistakenly... Seems that in their minds a detected target just had to be military ukrainian one....

Well, in my language there is a proverb about giving a razor to a monkee...

Someone who gave a SAM system with such capabilities to a group of rebels, should be brought to justice....

To summarize: answers to some questions stil being bandied about here
As to whether the plane was brought down by an SAM
from Angels
Additionally every square meter of this area is covered by military spy satellites 24/7; not only is Washington firmly convinced it was a SAM but Moscow has not offered any alternative theories so likely they are also certain.

As to who:
MAINJAFAD with the experience with these mobile SAM systems has explained very clearly in two posts that the system is highly automated and does not require highly sophisticated personnel to operate it -it is a mobile field system, thus that makes the eminent sense (IMHO)
So the separatist/rebels likely being run by the GRU and why? Because they could, they only knew it was a plane and being an undisciplined group of likely not very bright wannabe 'warriors' it never occurred them that before you shoot something down it would be the very good idea to determine if it was civilian or military -and whose I might add; they might have just as easily shot down a Russian plane.

sampublius:

The origin of this seems to have several aspects:

- A new toy in the hands of inexperienced operators
- A "point and shoot" targetting system
- Little analysis by the operators other than the direction the aircraft was coming from
- No visual due to height
- A combination of wanting to destroy materiel belonging to the other side, plus fear of bombing runs
- <i>Maybe</i> an escort by fighters which would have seemed suspicious on radar (large return flanked by smaller returns) - though this has gone quiet over the last few hours
- Little or nothing to be gained by deliberately shooting down a plane in no way connected to the conflict.

I personally go with the cock-up theory here. That isn't to say that someone isn't responsible, but not beginning warlike rhetoric seems to be a good response.

? EU, EASA, Etc... where were you?
 

jstflyin: welcome to the kingdom of the fonctionnaire -it never occurred to them.

jstflyin, nail squarely hit on head.

Politically the western powers have been banging on about Ukraine being in Europe - what in hell's name is EASA there for?

SAMPUBLIUS, the crew of the Vincennes mistook an A-300 for an F-14 fighter and at the time, the Vincennes had the best radar and electronic equipment that the U. S. Government could buy, and a supposedly highly trained crew.

Even if a NOTAM list is a chore to read it should be read. It may contain information which is very important to the safety of the flight.

They may have not offered any alternative theories for Western consumption, but their internal state media openly discuss a theory that it was shot down by an Ukrainian fighter plane.

ATCNetwork,

Surely something all professional pilots would do as a matter of course?

The challenge can be sorting the irrelevant dross (e.g. cranes near the airport) from the vitally important.

The big carriers have their own priority systems which do this but smaller operators do not and crew report times have been pared to the bone to facilitate longer duty days which arguably leaves inadequate time for a crew to brief prior to departure.

All true, and sometimes the filters don't work, for instance last week one of the notams in our briefing pack was reminding us of the new regulations for north sea helicopter operations. We fly fixed wing.

The flight plan comes from the company and as a crew you read the notams to be aware of whats on route and any potentially dangerous issues, but I think the point is, would you then object as a crew and refile the plan with a 500 mile detour when the notam is for FL320 and below, and everyone else is routing that way?

I would imagine with EFB's becoming commonplace this should be something that will become a lot easier also. Only the significant NOTAMS displayed for the planned route.

copied from another forum, hard to argue with this :

"It's quite possible the separatist have been given enough knowledge to operate the system but that the trainers never foresaw the possibility of a civilian airliner in a war zone and didn't bother to teach all of features contained in the system. The operators may have carried out procedures they were trained for but lacked the competence to use the system to it's fullest capability. Or there may have been one former member of the Ukrainian army instructing separatist that wasn't up to the workload and misidentified the target. I can think up several scenarios that don't require this to be an intentional attack on a civilian aircraft or direct responsibility. I don't think we currently have enough information to make a determination."

huh, this is real life not a movie...there are thousands of fully armed rebels with combat experience antitank weapons heavy artillery and as it seems anti-air support, it's not some african al qaeda village...

It seems most threaders are interested in giving their views on what happened and why but I see no mention to the possibility of the demise of a great airline that has suffered 2 tragic events in 4 months with the loss of over 540 lives. Where does Malaysia go from here? What will happen with the aircrew and ground engineers?
The aircraft crashed and it doesn't matter how much hypothesis and assumptions are made, it wont bring them either aircraft back or make it any easier for the losses.

The willingness of Russia's Government to state, with impressive conviction, the seemingly absurd is hardly unprecedented. "There are no Russian troops in Crimea" was once their mantra. Meanwhile rolls of film showing Russian troops, speaking Russian, wearing Russian uniforms driving Russian'-registered APCs were shown around the world.

As with so many of these tragic events, the most likely scenario is usually proved correct in time. Conspiracy theories simply don't have legs in the modern world where every hole in a theory is found and exposed. The chances of a Ukrainian fighter jet knowingly shooting down a civilian jet are a million to one. The odds of it being fanatical rebels probably more like two to one.

hamster3null: And your point? Moscow's internal state media is tasked with supporting the Kremlin narrative that Kiev has been taken over in a coup d'etat by a bunch of western supported degenerate fascists intent on doing harm to the noble orthodox god-fearing Russian people. That what they disseminate internally they do not try to sell to the global media is a very clear indication that they know it cannot pass the straight-face test outside of Russia. inside of Russia of course is an entirely different story. Consider, they even attempted to float the suggestion that inasmuch as Putin was flying back to Moscow from Brazil the very same day the Ukrainians where intent on shooting down his plane but mistakenly shot down MH17. The Russians are xenophobic, they dislike and distrust the west intensely, this stuff goes over big in Russia

found on twitter from bobik_57

http://i61.tinypic.com/14ad4lz.jpg

Why would Putin want the Buk launcher in Russia
 

If the Ukraine gov't has a complete inventory including serial numbers of the missiles and launchers seized by the rebels, Putin would definitely not want a launcher short a missile unless it's on its way to be dropped down a certain hole in the Yamal peninsula:E

Bits and pieces of the missile with any serial numbers will be urgently sought. If found by the rebels, any such pieces may be on their way to a blast furnace.

The Russians have lots of Buks and I would not be surprised if a couple Buks of similar vintage get new serial numbers and reinstalled on the launcher.

According to ABC News:

NATO General Warned of Russian ?Anti-Aircraft? Training for Separatists - ABC News


If that June 30 date is accurate it supports the contention some 'separatists' had recent training in vehicle-borne systems and access to them, and at some level Russian military/intelligence knew it as well.

It may also fuel the debate on why airlines continued to traverse that area. Would only NATO members specifically be advised of the increased risk to commercial aviation? Would the decision-makers at some airlines even understand the significance of vehicle-borne missile systems versus MANPADS?

I spoke to a friend who is a tour operator. This is extremely unfortunate for MAS. They were still reeling from the MH370, how they handled it (the Shaman dance display), going down in history for the most mysterious air disaster. In order to gain back some market share (already a non-profitable airline), they had slashed prices to the bone marrow. Now with another incident of this magnitude and worse still, in Europe, it might be the nail in the coffin for MAS. My friend is already seeing customers asking for refunds or changing carriers not so much because they worry about another accident, but they are worried that MAS will be defunct before their travel.
This is akin to the 'run on the bank' but it does not stop there. I suspect pilots and crew will also start to flow out. Being a national carrier, it would be a very hard decision for the Government. I reckon that it will be at minimum be a rename, redesign of the logo or paintwork. Something to give the airline a new image. One thing for sure is, tickets will be real cheap in the coming months.

Another tragedy on another level
 

This war crime is awful on so many levels. One of the world's leading experts in HIV was on the plane en route to the World AIDS conference in Australia, together with a few other researchers. Joep Lange was one of the eminent researchers in the field (not mine), heavily involved in development of novel therapies. As one person on Twitter wrote: "The solution to the AIDS pandemic may have been on that plane..."
Not to mention the 80 or so children. Sad,sad days.

I've often wondered just how much attention the run-of-the-mill pilot pays to a NOTAM. This is based on years of experience with amateur rocketry, where we are required to file for a waiver and get a NOTAM for our launches (anything over 3.3 lbs. and/or 4.2 oz. propellant). We often joke that NOTAM is really code for "something interesting, go take a look" because I can't recall a launch where we didn't have to suspend launch activities due to an aircraft within the NOTAM/waiver area/altitude.
More than once, the offending aircraft have actually orbited our location before apparently becoming bored and continuing on :* - this is with waiver altitudes as high as 40k (some events have waivers over 100k).
Usually, the offending aircraft is GA, but just a few weeks ago at a launch in Oregon, the offending aircraft was a 747-8i on a delivery flight (I verified the aircraft with binoculars, then double checked when I returned to work :uhoh:)