Really whatever the missile was the guilt of who shot down the aircraft was clearly displayed by one sickening fact!

Anyone who was innocent and wanted to show to the world that fact would have secured the crash site and allowed the investigators to remove the bodies with dignity and to then examine every bit of wreckage which itself would have identified the weapon used.

The guilty ones are those that allowed bodies to be removed took away the evidence and stopped the investigators from having access to the crash site.

The DPR and their Russian masters were guilty of this atrocity and proved this with their own actions over the crash site and attempts to clear the evidence.

May be you can take a look:

1. who is vandalizing
2. who is not

also may be take a look at seperatists leader interview regarding the situation on the ground and how difficult is for them to handle it, lets see their point of view before we jump into conclusions

Don't take me wrong, myself don't have any conclusions yet, I just wait for all this info-war dust to settle down.

Not by US politicians but by OSCE who observed the scene. You don't move actual hardware pieces around unless investigators tell you so. And specially if you are "poor", with dilapidated equipment you don't volunteer and move things around, right?

maybe they don't want to be pushed around and micromanaged by masked commandos who tell you where to look and where not to look and look at their watches and tell you your time is up.

Forensic view on victims
 

Forensic dentist, former assistant surgeon to Oz army, Dr Griffiths interviewed on ABCTV today.

Says the reported delay in refrigerating bodies does not affect victim identification because visual identification has proven time and again to be inaccurate. Decomposition of 5 days, in his experience of the Tsunami, does not affect victim ID.

He gave an example of the Bali bombing, where 18 families had positively identified their loved ones by visual reference, but the bodies were fortunately, not released until DNA was processed.

Of these 18 victims, 9 were wrongly identified by the visual method by their families:eek:

Sadly infants take longest to identify as they have no dental records.
He says 3 weeks is typical for such incidents.

He commented that following Lockerbie there is conjecture, but no evidence if anyone can survive a similar breakup at high altitude. Unless there are survivors it is conjecture, he said.

AreOut
 

A while back I posted BUK can climb to at least 72,000' (likely a good deal more)
See Wiki and Jane's for answers to your query. Unless you are drone flight or invisible there are S.A.M's in or near E.Ukraine that will blow you out of the sky.

Any pilot with a curiosity and a computer will find the reality.

ANALYSIS OF PHOTOGRAPHS
 

Has any contributor examined photographs of the debris with a view of spotting damage attributable to a missile strike? I believe I saw fuselage skin exhibiting an outward bend to a panel edge, and a substantial box section that apparently had peculiar failure lines. I have no relevant qualification, but maybe an engineer current on type might be able to say? (I presume accident investigators, past or present, will already have done this, but are wisely keeping their counsel.)

Re Analysis of Photographs
 

It's notoriously difficult to determine if an explosion is internal or external based on a few photographs.

You can easily get impact damage on one part of an aircraft from an explosion on another part. Even disintegrating wheels do this.

A proper investigation - which will happen for sure - will determine the location and type of any disruptive event. For reference, look at the NTSB report on TWA-800 which spent a very long time eliminating a US Navy missile, or terrorist missile, or an internal bomb as the cause for the observed damage.

As with another poster, very few people are asking why this particular plane and not Singapore, Air India or any others flying in the vicinity that day.

It takes the BUK 5 minutes to warm and launch a missile, which clearly shows intention to target this specific craft.

No airliner would have such luck to lose two 777s in 4 months without more to the story (as usual).

They sent out about 45 of our guys at the ATSB to assist alongside NTSB and other investigators. Quite a few very serious jobs involving our guys recently instead of the usual and more common GA incidents and loss of separation investigations/reports.

Hopefully these guys will be alright while investigating.

Media bias and propaganda and responsible journalism
 

Gotta love the comments here about media reports from eastern Ukraine... is it a "media scrum" traipsing around and through the site, or just "media scum"?


Did anyone catch the live Sky News presentation by Colin Brazier yesterday?


Oh why Colin and Sky News production and broadcast team? So wilfully and deliberately, joyously and gleefully, tampering and interfering with evidence and the crime scene by rummaging, sifting, rifling through ( call it what you may ) victims personal belongings on the crash site.


And then for Colin and Sky to apparently apologise and excuse this shameful, appalling, grotesque, disgusting, disgraceful, unprofessional and potentially criminal activity by journalists as due to being caught up the "truly macabre, horrific situation. There is a degree of anarchy and lawlessness." What a horrific and distasteful piece of so-called journalism.


Sadly Colin and Sky News are no better than the assorted motley crew of criminals, hooded thugs, rebels, armed separatists, Russian supporters and protagonists, and other low life that most ppruners here are rightly railing against.


Truly hope that oxygen thieves and appalling and pathetic little men and scumbags like Colin Brazier never make it on to air today and ever again, otherwise I might have to review the Sky subscription.

BBC radio report;
Rebel leader was interviewed, says the bodies in the refrigerated railway cars will be handed over to international investigators, when they arrive.


Scores of volunteers helping in search of bodies.

Fergal Keane's report shows that what appeared to be looting was a typical military response.

BBC News - MH17 air crash: Pro-Russia rebel video of crash aftermath

Media timeline would have us believe the investigators were scared away by a single shot fired by a sole inebriated soldier a few days ago?


I feel for the ill trained and equipped, firemen, local coal miners police and villagers having to deal with the scene.

Average net income in Ukraine is under $200 a month, less in rural areas.
Expecting a western rescue response is unrealistic.

It is a conflict, if not a war zone, it is as chaotic if it had happened in any such area.

I am sure this was an accident (and nothing more than bad luck for MAS). Had Obama got on the phone to Putin: "Vladimir, we gotta get out heads together on this, what do you want to do?", it's just possible we might have seen some cooperation, at least enough to recover the bodies. Threats were never going to work. Putin doesn't have to do anything and Obama won't. I hope. It's a tragedy for the families but it's not the end of the world. Yet.

cynical view
 

Every one of the 600 hundred posts above is guesswork, fodder for Daily Mail readers. Sure, speculation with a bit of technical jargon thrown in to make the posters look clever. As someone above said, probably feeding the tabloids.

The supposed experts on SAMs and black boxes etc who are coming out of the woodwork to show off their superior knowledge all miss the point. So do the spookers with their number 17 theories. They are scratching at the surface. This latest incident is another move in a political chess game over which only a small number of individuals world-wide has any knowledge, let alone control. It's all about money.

Whether Putin The Terrible is a bad boy or not, whether Obama has another agenda, as Ron Paul alleges, it doesn't really matter. It'll be forgotten in a few weeks like the last one has been and the truth, as ever, will be concealed because the general population is more interested in celebrities' boob jobs and next week's booze binge and the media is all run by a few select individuals in collaboration with the governments.

ISIS (or IS, who have clearly been having a rest) will be back next week executing children with Ebola and Malaysian airlines will continue to operate as though nothing happened.

Storm in a tea-cup. Sorry about the passengers but, as someone pointed out, the same number of civilians (maybe more) has been killed so far in this Ukranian conflict and get killed in every other conflict every day without the Daily Mail blinking an eye, just not affluent, air travelling white people. A couple of political doctors died, lawyers and bankers whose lives are apparently worth so much more than doctors killed in Iraq, Syria or anywhere else. And who cares about bankers.

Good work, western media, sold a lot of newspapers I hope. :D

@Mahatma Kote
There is a war zone out there.....it really is not like a normal functioning place with a police force, a compliant population and rule of law....let alone an air accident investigation team.

There will be no 'proper' investigation...any more than there is one is other plane crashes in conflicts.
I guess from launch traces/AWACS/Sat data etc the USA/USSR already know exactly what sub-type of missile it was and from exactly where it was launched.
We know what brought the plane down - the only thing 'we' don't know is who fired it.
I reckon in a few weeks time it will all have been "forgotten" much like MH370 has been.

Anyway
I've long ago issued instructions to those I know that if I get wiped out in a mega-one rather than the usual rubbish about how wonderful I was and how deeply I will be missed to instead issue a statement that I was a complete f'ing moron and didn't give a t8ss about anything.

Some images of MH17 remains were shown on internet. Those were damaged by what looks like shrapnel.
Anyone can identify:
-if these are parts of Boeing 777
-if this damage is likely to be caused by a missle like SA-11?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtDH0h0CEAA86Pt.jpg:large

Here is another one
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtDSVRZIQAAR8sZ.jpg:large
and here
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtDEIn0IIAAIo9k.jpg
and here
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtDWnTlIQAAxkIa.png:large

Are the 'rebels' this incompetent?

1. The conversation between a rebel commander and one of his troops about the incident is intercepted and available to western media within hours of it happening. The Ukrainian army must know the moves of the rebels before they even make them!

2. The rebels / Russians try to 'spirit away' the BUK launcher with a missile clearly missing. This is done in broad daylight on the back of a low loader with no escort and not even a tarpaulin to try to disguise it.

3. We are told the FDR has gone to Russia. But first we see it being carried across a field (again in broad daylight, with no covering) when the place is full of journos with HD cameras filming them.

@Bobman re: SAMs

Even missiles from 1961 only had a warm up time of 30 seconds.

V-755U 20DSU (Guideline Mod.3) surface to air missile
AP-755 autopilot, steering fins.
Time to spin up gyroscopes before launch: 30 second
Time to keep gyroscopes spinning without overheating: 5 minutes

This gives a 777 at cruise speed of 900km/h time to move less than 1km which is nothing when you've got detection and missile ranges of 45km to 75km and a target that can't detect, let alone manoeuvre or deploy countermeasures to avoid you.

All this info based on the SA-2E SAM system. For more details check out the "SAM Simulator" and read the supplied documentation then give it a go. You'll be achieving 80% kill rates against similar targets (I use the B52 target drone) in no time at all. You'll see exactly how hard it is to identify different targets from radar scope, but how easy it is to detect, track, lock and fire on a target.

@Pace

Sorry, but this is just very silly propaganda. Did anyone (EU, OSBE, NTSB) come there with some equipment to deal with the decomposing bodies and evidence or did they just send several whiners to look and complain?

Yes - some international body should have instantly sent troops there to secure the site together with the equipment to collect the bodies and the evidence. I am quite sure all sides would have agreed to it. It was not done because everyone wants to play politics with it, with decomposing bodies, with grieving families and their rage, western politicians first of all.

What was done on the ground was organizing a massive search party for the bodies to collect them and to put them on a train, in refrigerated cars, in order to send them to the West. Did you want them to be left rotting in the fields in 90+ deg F/30+ deg C scorching heat so that politicians could play politics with it some more????

The search party consists mainly of local miners who are well versed in rescue operations as they often have to deal with retrieving bodies of their friends buried in the mine.

They tried. The OSCE initially sent a team of 80 people with transport. Only four people were allowed access, only on foot and only for one hour.

Who to gain?
 

We are all speculating, but few are asking WHO would have anything to gain by this awful crime. Surely not the rebels - unless they thought it was incoming military. I tend to think Ukraine would be most likely to gain from it. And of course, if Ukraine did know the rebels had this hardware they stand some responsibility for not shutting down airspace.