New Malaysian airlines crash

icerat said:
BBC talking head expert says the rebels have the equipment to shoot one down - but probably not the equipment to identify what the plane was before shooting. :(
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OK -- I see what they're saying here.

A professional air defese crew working within an IADS (such as Russian or Ukraine would have the ability to discriminate but a group of rebel forces may not have the training, infrastructure and experience. I would suggest that the IFF receiver even in a stand-alone system would be albe to detect a regular commercial airliner, but I can't really confirm that.
 
Polaris said:
Flying along and suddenly the airplane you're in is torn apart. The lucky ones die instantly while the rest plummet 33,000 feet into the ground.

What a horrible way to die.
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Don't start me.

This sounds horribly like the IR655 incident over the Straits of Hormuz in July 1988.

Rolfe.
 
LTC8K6 said:
Well, we can take photos from the ground, of planes at 10KM, with civilian cameras, and they are clearly identifiable. So, I'm not sure why the military couldn't identify a 777.

http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/photos/0/8/3/2443380.jpg

http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/photos/0/4/4/2446440.jpg

http://cdn-www.airliners.net/aviation-photos/photos/4/6/1/2452164.jpg
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Because if it was the rebels with a shiny new SAM Launcher they will have tracked an aircraft coming in from the West and decided to have a shot. They won't have actually had a look at it.
 
BBC reports on a report that the rebels do have fighter planes flown from Crimea and that that shouldn't be an excluded possibility.
 
A similar launcher was seen by AP journalists near the eastern Ukrainian town of Snizhne earlier Thursday.
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That is apparently a reference to the AP reporting the presence of a missile launcher, presumably a buk launcher.

I can't find any more on that, though.
 
icerat said:
I think you'd need a deal of expertise to identify the difference between a military plane and a civilian plane at >10km with a pair of binoculars.
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It is pretty easy to distinguish different kinds of planes at cruising altitude with a pair of binoculars during the day with no clouds. Of course, it looks like the weather was partly cloudy today over the Donetsk region.
 
Rolfe said:
Don't start me.

This sounds horribly like the IR655 incident over the Straits of Hormuz in July 1988.

Rolfe.
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Well, the Aegis system correctly identified IR655 as a civilian plane by it's flight path and it correctly identified it's civilian beacon. It was the crew who decided Aegis was wrong...
 
Newtons Bit said:
Is there a translation of that, Icerat?
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yeah, getting one.

ETA:

news from Strelkov Igor "We have just shot down AN-26 plane in Torez area, it is there somewhere behind "progress" mine. We have warned - "Do not fly in our sky!" Here is video that proves another "bird falling down". It fell down behind terricon (some artificial hill made of mining leftovers) and didn't hurt any civilians."
 
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LTC8K6 said:
That is apparently a reference to the AP reporting the presence of a missile launcher, presumably a buk launcher.

I can't find any more on that, though.
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NATO will have known about the acquisition radar in the past and seen the targeting radar turn on (and probably then the launch signature), as well as Russia and the Ukraine so I suggest there is little official doubt about the system origin. They may have to sort through some data since they are probably in an active EM enviornment. Getting the actual information released is another matter.
 
LTC8K6 said:
Perhaps he just took credit for something he saw happen?
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They've shot down 3 planes in the last week, AP journalists have seen them with the equipment to shoot a jet that high, and they brag about shooting down another one - what do you really think? :(
 
icerat said:
They've shot down 3 planes in the last week, AP journalists have seen them with the equipment to shoot a jet that high, and they brag about shooting down another one - what do you really think? :(
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I think, as I posted earlier, that I still want to find that report from AP journalists about the buk launcher they saw...
 
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