As usual on this topic, I’m just stepping in to call silly buggers.
The Buk is a radar-operated system. It even has an entirely separate vehicle just for radar. It was well capable - and actually designed specifically for the purpose of - targeting overhead planes. Depending on the age of the missiles, it’ll have one of these three sets of specs.
An SA-11
• 3–19 miles and an altitude of 100–46,000 feet (9M38 missile, from 1979)
• 22 miles and the altitude up to 72,000 feet (9M38M1 missile, from 1984)
An SA-17
• 2–31 miles and 100–82,000 feet (9M317, from 1998)
Russia’s g2a missiles were designed to take out bombers and spy planes. Those travel in ways that make them just as difficult to target as the MH17 (a Boeing 777).
• A Boeing 777 has a cruise speed of 562 mph (905 km/h) and top speed of 590 mph (950 km/h). The MH17 was traveling at about 32,000 ft. when shot. (Any era missile attached to a Buk could have targeted and hit it.)
• A U-2 has a cruise speed of 429 mph (690 km/h) and top speed 500 mph (804 km/h), but it operates at above 70,000 feet. Due to the design of U-2s, you can’t strongly deviate from their cruise speed at high altitude. A U-2 was shot down over Soviet airspace in 1960, prior even to the development of Buks, and due to the design of U-2s they can’t “loiter” - they’ll stall if they don’t run in a small window of speed at high altitudes.
Last bit - 5 minutes is a veeeeeery long time to target. Ever played a first-person shooter? Ever fired a gun? C’mon, be serious!
Which leaves the open question of why the Uke army had four or five units actively operating in the area. Since the separatists have no aircraft, what were they looking for?
And why did Kiev’s ATC route the plane over the conflict zone?
Occam’s razor exactly. As bad as some in this thread would like to believe, I find it absurd to think that NATO would engender the shoot-down of a civillian airliner to attempt the manipulation of the political order to suit their needs. Leaving aside the entirely ghoulish prospect of the murder of ~300 passengers, planning for such a mission would never be able to take into account the multitudinous ways the thing could turn against the instigator to the tune of starting a real shooting war between Russia and NATO. If the Ukrainians shot down the airliner, why the hell would they be returning the launcher with its unspent missiles back to Russia, where they could be used as proof that the Ukrainians did the dirty work?
And, @Jim_R, the rebels do have A-G missiles–that’s been attested to in numerous places, as well as by the rebels themselves in both social media as well as their own touting of bringing down Ukrainian trooptransports. But then, you speak of the “‘media’”, so there’s that. As for your suggestion that there were “four or five [Buk launchers] in the area on that day,” please note where that information
As for BB being a tool of the war machine, not so much. Try a different tack.
As for @Jim_R’s contention about the Ukrainians have Buk missile launchers–they have a military, they are fighting a shadow war against Russia. Why wouldn’t they have the potential to shoot down aggressor aircraft?
And Kiev was routing numerous aircraft through the area–check FlightRadar, unless you consider that a tampered-with source. Rostov-On-Don receives a goodly portion of air traffic in the area, and hell, there’s more than enough air traffic moving from Western Europe to the Middle East and Far East that passes through that area.
That has nothing to do with my comment, and since you’re answering with a couple unrelated questions - you clearly have no valid response to my comment. I won’t be replying to your questions because they’re just an attempt to ignore the information I provided, and I have no interest in prolonged discussion with you if you’re dealing with reality.
BTW, to repeat it:
A Buk could have easily targeted and shot down that plane.
People, stop citing Occam’s Razor when you clearly have no concept what it means.
Whenever I hear someone drop Occam’s Razor like they just wiped their mouth with the Shroud of Turin, I immediately know I’m dealing with an amateur.
From Wikipedia:
It states that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. Other, more complicated solutions may ultimately prove correct, but—in the absence of certainty—the fewer assumptions that are made, the better.
And this…
In the scientific method, Occam’s Razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion.
Occam’s Razor is not a law.
Occam’s Razor essentially says that the simplest explanation is preferred. It doesn’t even state that the simplest explanation is more plausible.
“Occam’s Razor” is the kind of twaddle you hear in late night arguments in the freshman dorm about god and society and why aren’t chicks sleeping with me?
The goal could be to start a shooting war between Russia and NATO. And there isn’t really any credible evidence of missile launchers crossing the Russian border around that time.
Air to Ground missiles would be going in the wrong direction. And the separatists don’t have any airplanes to launch them from.
Reinforcing the propaganda is being a tool of the war machine.
So far, there is no war against Russia, despite various attempts to start one. The so-called “Anti Terrorist Operation” does not need SA-11s. If Russia changes that policy, those antiquated SAM systems will not last out the hour.
The normal course of that flight would take it over the Sea of Azov, several hundred kilometers to the south. That day, it was ordered to change course and fly over the conflict zone in the lowest echelon for commercial air traffic.
He does actually answer that in the next sentence. It would take a huge amount of complexity for it to be intentional and would involve very significant risk of it being found out or not working at all. They would have to make it convincing enough that the Russians couldn’t refute it, even though the missile was shot in an active war zone from behind enemy lines. The idea that NATO was involved in shooting down the plane is firmly in the “conspiracy theory” category at the moment, especially as there’s not really any convincing evidence for it and the other theory makes a lot more sense in addition to being simpler. Why would NATO agree to deliberately shoot down a passenger plane in order to frame the Russian separatists of doing the same thing accidentally? This isn’t the Lusitania, nobody’s suggesting that NATO should declare war on Russia and while there are economic sanctions, the damage that they will do is nothing compared with the fallout if NATO were found to have done this. I agree with Borodai: the rebels had no motive to do this, but the idea that it was misidentified or the missile hit the wrong target is still plausible (and is the version that most people seem to believe right now). The claims from rebel leaders that this was an air to air missile, that the bodies were already dead or that the evidence is 'shopped have either been disproven or are not convincing from the start. I don’t like how the west is trying to push everything on Russia, but the truth is that if they have been supplying the rebels with arms and are influencing the course of the war for their own ends, they do share some of the blame for these events. There is a lot of hypocrisy from the west as our governments do the same when it’s in our interests, but Russia does need to be called out on this.
Ahh, the grand conspiracy beckons! That could be, but it could also be the goal to elect Mickey Mouse as leader of the free world. Which is as likely as NATO wanting to foment a direct war with Russia instead of the tried-and-true use of proxies.
My mistake–I meant Ground to Air, and my point still stands. The rebels have repeatedly boasted of shooting down aircraft with such technology. Wonder where they got that from?
Your 3rd point, meh.
4. ?
5. You fly there? You’re aware of the exact routing for a Europe–>Asia flight? I recommend watching a bit of flightradar24 prior to the shootdown and you’ll see plenty of Donetsk-area overflights by commercial aircraft. But don’t let that stand in the way of a good conspiracy.
Standard feature, and pretty neat at that. Load the site and check the top left corner for the “Playback” button:
Then you can select the date and time you’d like to review. Once you’ve got that going, the site offers standard movie player controls so you can scrub forward/back and set the overall speed of the playback.
