Interfax said it was shot down. Russia - via their ambassador at the United Nations - denied involvement already.
Let's hope this plane won't be the Franz Ferdinand 100 years later.
Edit: I am talking about the US-Russian relationship deteriorating because of the (blamed) intent, not the number of casualties or the strength of the Malaysian army.
Edit 2: Thanks for the links on previous situations like this. Reassuring.
It's overwhelmingly likely to have been shot down by "Ukrainian rebels", who are Russian-backed.
It's not going to be the end of the world unless someone very high profile was on board, but it will further worsen relations with Russia. Malaysia isn't exactly a nuclear superpower. A US airliner would be a lot closer to end of the world territory.
Number of civilian casualties is roughly comparable to those in the past few weeks in Gaza.
>Number of civilian casualties is roughly comparable to those in the past few weeks in Gaza.
That comparison is interesting. What is it about planes that draws so much attention when something like this happens? It is barely news when a couple hundred civilians die on the ground in a war zone, but put the same civilians in the air and the whole world pays attention.
EDIT: Some people have mentioned that Gaza is all over the news but I would make the argument that the civilian casualties aren't what is making news. What is making news is the eruption of hostilities in the first place. For example, compare the coverage of Gaza to Iraq, Ukraine, etc. There have been several times more civilian casualties in numerous other active war zones this month, but they aren't new conflicts so news agencies aren't focusing on them.
1. Almost everyone has an intrinsic fear of flying and any accidents in the air hit that nerve.
2. Everybody knows that living in a war zone is dangerous. Conversely, you know whether you're living in a war zone or not, so most people don't see deaths in war zones as related to their everyday lives.
However, in this case, these people were on a flight between Amsterdam and Malaysia. They weren't involved in a war in any way. So that really hits a nerve. You can image yourself in their place.
A bunch of random people with different life stories together inside a tin can flying thanks to physics' magic exploding fuel at 800km/h. It's something that a lot of people can relate to as millions fly every single day not really expecting to die, specially over a war zone. That's why we pay attention. The massacre in Gaza is pretty important as well, but an entirely different story.
noun
an indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of many people.
verb
deliberately and brutally kill (many people).
"""
Tell me how what happens in Gaza is consistent with "indiscriminate" and "deliberately" as long as only launch sites and weapons caches are targeted and warnings are sent out well in advance, something I haven't heard any other army has ever done so consistently before. (And I will happily tell you that I don't think the Israelis are without fault. I just want this sick twisting of referential frames to stay away from hn.)
Turn on any American news outlet, check the front page of any American newspaper, and you'll see tons of coverage of Gaza. It's all over the place. Wall to wall.
If you aren't seeing it then you either aren't really paying attention, or you don't consume American media and have no idea what you're talking about on this topic.
Well, it's going to be overshadowed by this plane crash for a bit.
People are afraid of flying because they aren't in control. When you or someone you can see is behind the wheel, you have more control, which makes you feel safer (even though having that control makes things more dangerous).
Train crashes are still a big deal, but if you're in a train crash and survive then rescue vehicles/personnel will show up. If your plane breaks up or whatever and you survive, you're almost certainly going to die when you hit the ground. Gravity and velocity are much bigger factors than for trains, in general.
The Asiana plane crash at SFO last year where only 2 or 3 people died as the plane crashed and broke up upon landing is very, very unusual.
Very, very very unusual. I thought it was a relatively low energy crash before viewing amateur video that made it clear that near the end the nose was on the ground and the rest of the plane pivoted around it 270 degrees or more (!). The crash bled off energy in a slow, survivable way.
Sure, but he wasn't talking about coverage but about fear of flying. Very few people are afraid of riding a train in the same sense that many are afraid of flying in a plane. It's an interesting point.
Couple reasons of the top of my head: War is common. Plane crashes are rare. The average CNN viewer doesn't live anywhere near a warzone, but they probably have and are going to ride a commercial flight.
You seen how many people have died in eastern Ukraine recently? 478 civilian deaths, 1000+ injured. 10,000s of people fleeing across the border to Russia. I have family there in kramatorsk. Most action is carried out by the Ukrainian army trying to rid cities from the separatists. Disgraceful. http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21607852-battle-continu...
If it was shot down, it was done with some pretty high-grade weaponry. You can't touch a passenger plane at cruise altitude with a shoulder-mounted RPG.
"Dutch passengers aboard crashed Boeing 777". Curacao Chronicle. 17 July 2014. Retrieved 17 July 2014. "Dutch travel Agency D-Reizen confirms that Dutch citizens were on board. Also, through ANWB Reizen, we learn that about fifteen or sixteen Dutch citizens were on board. It’s about people who have booked at Fox Reizen and SNP, which falls under ANWB Reizen. Tour operator WTC.nl believes it’s between twenty and thirty Dutch citizens who have booked through the site."
This is overwhelmingly likely a false flag operation performed by CIA and the new Ukrainian government to further deligitimize the ethnic Russian population in Eastern Ukraine and put additional pressure on Putin to denounce them or face the disapproval of the entire Western world.
But let's go with your overwhelmingly more sensible explanation since I am clearly just a KGB paid astroturfer and a crazy conspiracy theorist to boot and nothing like that would ever happen in the real world.
There is no motivation for the separatists to do this.
"We don't recognize the current government and want more autonomy. Let's shot down a foreign passenger plane! That'll help our cause!"
But the point I was really trying to make is that there is no "overwhelmingly likely" theory at this point. There are just knee-jerk reactions based on your preexisting world view.
You're assuming it had to be intentional, which is an overwhelmingly unjustified assumption. All it would take is the person in control of the weapon to think it's a military transport.
Most likely, it's an accident. Somewhere else in this thread, there's links to a Russian separatist claiming to have shot down what he thought was a military transport with a Buk missile system that they bragged about having several weeks ago.
This seems to make the most sense. I can buy that maybe Russia slipped them parts of a high-end anti-aircraft missile system. Maybe enough to shoot it at an aircraft they saw. But it's plausible that they don't have the high-end air-search radar and/or the personnel with experience in managing the results of such a radar, or with the experience in operating it in cooperation with an anti-aircraft missile battery, that would allow them to reliably identify aircraft and direct attacks against only against the desired targets. They also likely have reason to be on alert to aircraft coming to attack them.
I would also think that the Ukrainian military is likely to have proper air-search radar and the experience using it to identify aircraft properly. And not much reason to be on high alert for potentially hostile aircraft, since the rebels don't have any, and Russia isn't in the fight on that level now.
I think everyone is assuming it was an accident. Coming at it from the direction of trying to explain why anyone would choose to shoot down a passenger plane probably doesn't help clarify the situation.
> Let's hope this plane won't be the Franz Ferdinand 100 years later.
Don't worry. Malaysia can join forces with Thailand, and then together attack all of their neighbours, but that would hardly make an impact to the "world order".
No, it was not only Austria going after Serbia, but Austria and Germany together going after all of their neighbours, including Serbia, France, Russia, Belgium, ...
Not until Russia started to mobilize to defend Serbia. Australia versus Serbia would've been a minor conflict if it weren't for the various defensive agreements the Great Powers had with smaller states.
If we were to be pedantic here, Austria was losing badly against Serbia for more then a year. At that time it was clear that Austria did not have a standing chance to win against Serbia in any meaningful way without extensive help from other countries, so the conflict couldn't really be qualified as minor.
The things started to change when German army joined with Austrian forces in attack to Serbia, and Bulgaria decided to step in and stab Serbia from behind, but at this point the conflict was already far from "minor" and "local".
Let's hope this plane won't be the Franz Ferdinand 100 years later.
Edit: I am talking about the US-Russian relationship deteriorating because of the (blamed) intent, not the number of casualties or the strength of the Malaysian army.
Edit 2: Thanks for the links on previous situations like this. Reassuring.