[HN Gopher] Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passe...
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Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers
Author : JumpCrisscross
Score : 498 points
Date : 2024-12-27 12:21 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| H8crilA wrote:
| BTW, this is (also) why the occasional Russian missile
| successfully penetrates the eastern flank of Europe. The damage
| potential of switching your entire air defense setup to a more
| aggressive posture will eventually result in civilian casualties.
| This happens everywhere, just the other day an American F-18 was
| shot down by an American destroyer in the Red Sea, and an F-18
| carries additional deconfliction equipment that an airliner
| doesn't have. As of today Europe is still using the peacetime
| kosher method of "we need to intercept it with a combat jet, have
| a look, ask the president, then maybe shoot it down".
| perihelions wrote:
| It's also the reason the US (last I checked*) has standing
| orders not to attempt to down the drones of unknown origin
| (adversary espionage, I guess) that swarm at military bases.
| The risk of accidentally attacking a civilian aircraft vastly
| outweighs--what they assess as--the immediate threat of the
| drones.
|
| When there was a panic about the Chinese spy balloon last year,
| the US sent armed F-22's to shoot down... at least three
| different unmanned civilian balloons [0,1].
|
| edit: I think I was wrong; apparently the US has a new "deadly
| force" order as of last week [2].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34824653 ( _" Hobby
| Club's Missing Balloon Feared Shot Down by USAF
| (aviationweek.com)"_) 371 comments
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34814717 ( _" The US
| Air Force may have shot down an amateur radio pico balloon over
| Canada (rtl-sdr.com)"_, 168 comments
|
| [2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/us-
| temporarily-b... ( _" US temporarily bans drones in parts of
| NJ, may use "deadly force" against aircraft"_)
| JohnBooty wrote:
| No, I think you're right.
|
| I'm quite sure the "deadly force" wording was for effect,
| more than any kind of actual change in posture or practice.
| Unless I'm mistaken there are still plenty of drones being
| seen in NJ and they're not blasting them out of the sky. And
| they've always had the option of lethal force around bases
| anyway. what they assess as--the immediate
| threat of the drones
|
| None of us know for sure but I think the immediate threat of
| the drones is negligible. If US bases are leaking signals
| that can be intercepted by drones overhead then these same
| signals could be just as easily intercepted by cars driving
| past the bases or nearby homes. And as far as the visible
| spectrum is concerned all the major players have satellites
| overhead anyway.
|
| And as you say, the risks of shooting drones down are high.
| Damage to nearby property. Accidental shootdowns of innocent
| craft. Successful shootdowns would reveal our capabilities.
| Unsuccessful shootdowns would reveal our _inability_ to deal
| with the threat. And in aggregate this would all give the
| enemy lots of intel as to where we do and don 't have
| defenses. And open war (!!!) over our skies is, to put it
| mildly, kind of a big deal. There are, to put it mildly,
| global economic consequences.
|
| Of course, that's all _if_ these drones are of hostile
| origin, which I think is still a very open question.
|
| If these drones are "ours," which would be weird but also
| plausible, then the "deadly force" note in the FAA notice
| could just be part of the cover story.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _If US bases are leaking signals that can be intercepted
| by drones overhead then these same signals could be just as
| easily intercepted by cars driving past the bases or nearby
| homes_
|
| Not really. Some signals can be very much unidirectional
| (eg, visible only to an overhead drone) instead of
| omnidirectional (eg, a car).
| powersnail wrote:
| Just curious; what kind of signals would be uni-
| directionally beaming upwards? For communicating with
| aircrafts that directly hover above the base? Wouldn't
| that be really limiting in terms of usefulness?
| jusssi wrote:
| Satellites.
| traverseda wrote:
| Satellite base stations
| exe34 wrote:
| I'm surprised the US doesn't carry bigger drones with
| butterfly nets.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But those drones would have to wear the same uniforms as
| the Keystone Cops to put it to full effect.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| They could send Spiderman Drones with web slingers!
|
| https://www.fun.com/marvel-3-inch-spider-man-flying-
| figure-i...
| ethbr1 wrote:
| In the US there are also major restrictions to federal US
| military operating on US soil. [0]
|
| Thus, any action (or effectors traveling) outside base
| boundaries would generally be illegal.
|
| Given the mobility of drones and desire to prevent their
| encroachment on bases in the first place, the appropriately
| legal unit for this would be non-federalized national guard
| air defense units, tasked by the state governor to
| intervene.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
| kbolino wrote:
| Drones can capture much higher resolution images, and from
| very different angles, than satellites. Both are useful,
| and neither really replaces the other. A high-res composite
| image taken from multiple angles and exposures can confirm
| or refute what was just a hunch from satellite imagery
| alone.
| Sanzig wrote:
| > None of us know for sure but I think the immediate threat
| of the drones is negligible. If US bases are leaking
| signals that can be intercepted by drones overhead then
| these same signals could be just as easily intercepted by
| cars driving past the bases or nearby homes. And as far as
| the visible spectrum is concerned all the major players
| have satellites overhead anyway.
|
| You can also do radio frequency signals intercepts from
| space, too. You need a big antenna on your satellite, but
| it's essentially a solved problem. Spaceborne SIGINT goes
| back to at _least_ the early 70s.
| Xylakant wrote:
| The problem with satellites however is that they cannot
| loiter, so the window in which they can gather data is
| limited and predictable. They are also essentially fixed
| on their track - changing orbit requires fuel. Drones
| (and old-fashioned spy planes) do not suffer from that
| limitation.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Tossing a battery-powered radio in a gallon ziplock into
| the woods outside the chainlink for the base also works,
| and would have more loitering capability than a drone.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's not 'for effect'. It's the legal description of use of
| a firearm by police/military.
|
| The "drone threat" is a bunch of mass hysteria. Every photo
| I was shown was obviously a passenger jet liner.
| codedokode wrote:
| Drones are dangerous. First, they can take high-quality
| photos, second they can jam the radio communications and
| GPS, third, they may contain explosives.
| SR2Z wrote:
| > Unless I'm mistaken there are still plenty of drones
| being seen in NJ and they're not blasting them out of the
| sky.
|
| Would these drones be running FAA-standard navigation
| lights and a transponder? Because that seems to be the case
| for most of these drone spottings :)
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I know what you're saying! Clearly the vast majority of
| these drone sightings seem to be regular aircraft.
|
| Some do not seem to be, although my skepticism is high
| because I have seen a lot of faked UFO videos over the
| years and faking points of light in the night sky is
| like, _the_ easiest thing to fake in a fake video /photo.
|
| While I think this is unlikely, we _could_ imagine that
| whoever is doing shady drone stuff _might_ want to
| actually observe some basic safety rules, ridiculous as
| that sounds.
|
| Suppose for a second that these drones are a "flex" from
| China/Russia/whoever. Causing a midair collision with an
| aircraft because they're running dark, or risking the
| chance of that because they're running dark, is a lot
| more serious than just flying some drones.
|
| And if it's aliens, hey, maybe they're just trying to...
| uh, fit in by mimicing our airplanes' safety lights? =)
| llamaimperative wrote:
| What adversarial intelligence would fly drones at night
| extremely low with their lights on?
|
| IMO most likely commercial LIDAR mapping by some company
| that'd rather remain stealth.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| None and in most cases it's not even clear it's happening.
| Due to perspective, a plane far away and a drone up close
| could look very similar at night when all you can see are
| lights in a dark sky.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Totally, it at least seems quite clear it's _not_
| happening anywhere near the extent to which it 's
| suspected of happening.
|
| Drones fly around. It's legal. It's fun. It's interesting
| for countless reasons to countless people. Really speaks
| to the state of our information environment that so many
| have been thrown into an absolute tizzy.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Most people just don't know much about drones or planes
| really. They don't know how their brain interprets what
| it sees. Etc
|
| It's obviously just mass hysteria.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| This would make a fascinating case study about how many
| people have never looked up at their own skies before. I
| also wouldn't be surprised if the hysteria is being
| amplified to distract from all the other nonsense in the
| world right now.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| A star light-years away also looks the same, and it's
| pretty hilarious when they're mistaken for "drones"
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Sadly when the United States Coast Guard reports being
| followed by unknown drones (and unknown drones have been
| reported around military space by military personnel for
| years) and the government response is to say 'we don't
| know, and we are doing nothing' people tend to become
| concerned. The best way to stop vigilanties is to have a
| system of laws and and government that follows the laws and
| that instill trust in the people. When the government just
| shrugs, well... that's how you end up with horrible/idiotic
| vigilanytism.
|
| I'm a government institutions guy, but yes, let's attack
| people for... following basic human nature, not the
| government big brains that ignore basic realities of human
| nature about needing trust in stable/steady government
| institutions who instead just demand 'faith in government'
| that isn't earned. The government isn't just failing in
| actions, they are failing in understanding this BASIC
| requirement for governing.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| So... outlaw drones? Or are you proposing we just start
| shooting people's toys out of the sky? At what cost per
| drone is justifiable to achieve this? A couple hundred
| thousand dollars and risk of misfires, aviation
| accidents, and shrapnel?
|
| I think the people panicking about drones are not going
| to be a fan of a federal ban on them. Just my two cents
| though.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I'm not proposing anything. I'm just pointing out when
| the government fails to lead/leaves a vacuum people can
| quickly turn to vigilantist/dumb type behavior and follow
| the first person/thought/idea that fills the void.
|
| Here the government said 'the United States Coast Guard
| mistook some 747s far away for 12 drones following their
| boat and if it wasn't planes then actually we assessed
| the 12 drones and found they aren't a threat, we don't
| know what they are, whose they are, or were they came
| from' and expected people to just go, hmm, ok, nevermind
| then.
|
| Nature abhors a vacuum. Government is there to help
| control/direct what it gets filled with when it's a
| societal one.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| That's what they want you to think. The sailors on the
| Iranian aircraft carrier and the Bigfoot pay close
| attention to FAA regulations.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "It's also the reason the US (last I checked*) has standing
| orders not to attempt to down the drones of unknown origin"
|
| I think it depends. The smaller drones are allowed to be
| zapped using equiptment designed to take down drowns. They
| generally aren't shooting traditional munitions at drones
| domestically for multiple safety reasons, unless they are
| over a specific size/altitude.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Important to note that it was a panic about an alleged
| chinese spy balloon, but in all likelihood it was just a
| weather balloon. There was no proof it was a spy balloon.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Ummm, no. We recovered the balloons and they were full of
| surveillance equipment.
|
| They seemed to not have a way to phone home, so more than
| likely China's plan was to recover the balloon to get the
| data. That may be what you recall. For all we know they had
| been doing so for years successfully.
|
| But they were definitely spy balloons.
| jameshart wrote:
| The US downed and recovered _a_ Chinese balloon, not
| balloons.
|
| The 2023 incident is pretty well written up on
| Wikipedia[1].
|
| There was one Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot
| down. Subsequent shoot-downs of balloons over the arctic
| and Great Lakes were not attributed to China - one that
| was recovered was definitively identified as a private
| weather balloon.
|
| There were also previous Chinese surveillance balloon
| overflights - as well as one over Central America - that
| were not shot down.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_in
| cident
| indymike wrote:
| > in all likelihood it was just a weather balloon
|
| Normal weather balloons are 20ft in diameter. This one was
| 200 feet in diameter and carried quite a payload - about
| the size of a couple of box cars. Additionally it had
| propellers and the ability to steer itself.
|
| > There was no proof it was a spy balloon.
|
| There was a preponderance of evidence - from the route of
| the balloon (over US strategic nuclear missle silos), to
| the equipment that was recovered to radio intercptions.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Chinese_balloon_incident
| jandrese wrote:
| This is also why there was reluctance to shoot the
| balloon down until it had passed over the ocean. The
| enormous payload container was a definite threat to life
| and limb if shot down over a populated area, and most of
| the US has at least a token population.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| It's also much easier to do less damage on the drone
| itself by shooting it over water than land. Honestly I
| think that played a major factor where they shot it down.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| A lot of this stuff is "doing something" to calm people down.
| People are losing their minds.
|
| Where I live in upstate NY, Nextdoor.com was losing its shit
| over a "drone", actually a lidar mapping plane, and some of
| the dumber people were suggesting taking shots at the
| Iranians.
| nativeit wrote:
| I'm waiting for the next seemingly inevitable object
| lesson: it's insanely illegal, federally illegal, to shoot
| at flying objects, for what I would have hoped were obvious
| reasons. But it seems we're still really rather dumb as a
| collective.
| hansvm wrote:
| > obvious reasons
|
| It's maybe worth mentioning that the obvious reasons
| almost entirely have to do with the things you'd hit in
| the air, not once the bullet descended. If everyone on
| earth suddenly shot upward at around 80 degrees from the
| ground, you'd expect approximately zero casualties on
| average from the bullets falling and lethally striking
| surface objects (there would be a number of welts and
| bruises as well as minor property damage, but even that
| is less likely than you might suspect).
| CydeWeys wrote:
| People are routinely killed by falling bullets. It turns
| out that the vast majority of idiots firing blindly into
| the air don't know or care to shoot only straight up, and
| it would be the same problem for whichever idiots were
| trying to shoot down drones.
| hiatus wrote:
| > People are routinely killed by falling bullets.
|
| Do you have a citation for that? I can't find any numbers
| on people getting hit by falling bullets, let alone
| fatalities. Things let celebratory gunfire don't seem to
| be comparable since people tend to congregate outside for
| celebrations resulting in larger groups of potential
| unintentional targets.
| alphan0n wrote:
| Here you go:
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/201323
|
| Celebratory gunfire incidents were included, but only
| make up 4.6% of the total.
|
| In approximately one year:
|
| >Altogether, 317 persons received stray bullet injuries;
|
| >142 (44.8%) were female, and 176 (55.5%) were outside
| the age range 15 to 34 years.
|
| >Most individuals (258, 81.4%) were unaware of the events
| leading to the gunfire that caused their injuries.
|
| >Many (129, 40.7%) were at home; most of these persons
| (88, 68.2%) were indoors.
|
| >Sixty-five persons (20.5%) died, 18 (27.7%) of them at
| the shooting site and 55 (84.6%) on the day they were
| shot.
|
| >Fourteen persons received nonfatal injuries by secondary
| mechanisms.
| toss1 wrote:
| I have not logged the citations, but I distinctly recall
| reading on the order of one-two news reports per year of
| people being killed by falling bullets in multiple
| different countries, including US, Brazil, and several
| middle eastern countries.
|
| Also, injuries and one fatality were confirmed by
| Mythbusters in [0]. Read the account for Episode 50,
| which was the only myth to receive all three ratings
| (Busted, Plausible, and Confirmed) at the same time.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2006_season)
| alphan0n wrote:
| Some data on stray bullet fatalities just in Rio:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1284427/stray-
| bullets-vi...
| hansvm wrote:
| I'm not sure that's at all the same thing with the
| extremely high rate of violent crime involving guns in
| Brazil. Pointing a gun straight at a city background,
| missing your specific target, and still injuring/killing
| somebody is very different from pointing a gun at the sky
| and having the 170 ft/s bullet fall, manage to hit that
| same highly populated region, and cause problems.
| linotype wrote:
| It's really not the collective. It's every town and
| cities loonies that now have formed a small but vocal
| subset of the population thanks to the Internet.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| I think a solid 95% of what people think are drones are
| actually passenger planes so I'm glad we're not firing at
| them.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| There's no "identify friend or foe" excuse for shooting down an
| airliner beyond human error.
| teitoklien wrote:
| A missle travels at tremendous speeds and require automated
| defence systems to neutralize the target at a safe explosion
| distance in the sky, which often does not afford humans to
| make "phone calls" and "meetings" and "discussion" to down
| the threat, before it potentially blasts a population centre
| or a military installation with thousands of soldiers and
| civilians at the base.
|
| Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and not
| downing it, But rather a risk between downing an missile that
| can "potentially" be an airliner that god knows why is in a
| restricted airspace, and letting it fly and risk getting
| killed those thousands or even millions of people (if a
| population centre/city) get exploded with bombs and missiles.
| diggan wrote:
| > Military doesnt decide between downing an airliner and
| not downing it, But rather a risk between downing an
| missile that can "potentially" be an airliner that god
| knows why is in a restricted airspace, and letting it fly
| and risk getting killed those thousands or even millions of
| people (if a population centre/city) get exploded with
| bombs and missiles.
|
| With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian
| military is, could they really be so far behind that
| they're unable to determine the difference between an
| commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?
|
| At a glance, just looking at the trajectory of this UFO for
| half a minute would be enough to determine if it's an
| airline with stable flight path, VS a missile that has some
| sort of trajectory that doesn't look at all like a airline.
| Not to mention the radar signature has to be different in
| at least some ways.
|
| But again, I don't know the capability or process of the
| Russian military, in a high-tension environment sometimes
| shit just goes wrong even though it shouldn't.
| teitoklien wrote:
| > With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian
| military is, could they really be so far behind that
| they're unable to determine the difference between an
| commercial airlines and a high-speed missile
|
| If they exclude radar signature of commercial airliners,
| and let them fly, it will just make weapon makers start
| designing high-speed missiles with the radar signature of
| an airliner lol.
|
| There is a reason why a lot of military and sci-fi movies
| have the phrase "aircraft with radar signature of a bird"
| , anything that the military excludes or allows to pass
| off, just becomes the cloning target of missile makers
| under the tag of "camouflage".
| simoncion wrote:
| > ... it will just make weapon makers start designing
| high-speed missiles with the radar signature of an
| airliner lol.
|
| Well, the problem with that is that airliners are
| (relatively speaking) slow as fuck. A "high-speed
| missile" with the radar cross section of an airliner
| would be mind-meltingly obvious as a threat even to
| automated defense robots.
| perihelions wrote:
| Iran mistook PS752 for a cruise missile [0]. It's not an
| impossible mistake; a cruise missile is (often) a
| subsonic, jet-powered object.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_A
| irlines...
| simoncion wrote:
| Point of order: A cruise missile isn't a high-speed
| missile. It's (almost?) always a big, slow, lumbering
| bastard, as far as missiles go.
| mapt wrote:
| There are cruise missiles powered by ramjets that go
| significantly supersonic, but for the most part ballistic
| missiles are easier to use, longer range, and harder to
| intercept. The prospect of anti-air systems effective
| enough to pose ballistic missiles trouble in a "near-
| peer" non-nuclear conflict is recent. Both maneuvering-
| capable ramjet/scramjet cruise missiles and (the
| significantly easier) maneuverable hypersonic re-entry
| vehicles that launch ballistically, are the subject of
| recently fielded early models, active development &
| active testing because of that prospect.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Hence the term "cruise", which in every other context
| means not traveling especially fast.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Airliners aren't slow by cruise missiles standards:
| supersonic cruise missiles are few and far between, and
| most cruise missiles in fact fly roughly at the speed of
| an airliner (between 800 and 1000km/h).
| simoncion wrote:
| You're the second person to talk about cruise missiles in
| this subthread.
|
| The comment I replied to (and quoted in my reply) talked
| specifically about "high-speed missiles". Nearly all
| cruise missiles are most emphatically NOT that sort of
| missile.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Stealth airplanes might have the radar cross section of a
| bird but they don't have the same flight characteristics
| (altitude, speed.) If you can manage to see it, you won't
| confuse it for a bird.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| put another way, your average seagull ain't cruising at
| 10000 feet @ 600 mph
| CPLX wrote:
| A flock of migratory birds could very easily be cruising
| at that height, and if in a fast moving jetstream or
| similar could be moving at hundreds of miles an hour when
| referenced to a ground based source.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That came as news to me. Some fly at 11200m/37,000 feet.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_birds_by_flight_h
| eig...
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| If you've ever dropped a French fry at the beach, you
| know that's not true.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| > _it will just make weapon makers start designing high-
| speed missiles with the radar signature of an airliner
| lol._
|
| The weapons industry isn't _that_ enthusiastic about
| blatantly violating the Geneva Conventions. There would
| be massive diplomatic costs to making, selling, buying or
| firing missiles with fake civilian transponders.
| lostlogin wrote:
| When I look at current conflicts, I'm not sure that the
| Geneva convention features anywhere in anyone's thought
| processes.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| You are describing a war crime.
| perihelions wrote:
| Ukraine uses (among other things) fixed-wing drones with
| similar characteristics to civilian aircraft. Some of
| them are *actual* civilian aircraft, retrofitted into
| unmanned suicide drones,
|
| https://www.flightglobal.com/military-uavs/ukraine-
| appears-t... ( _" Ukraine appears to deploy modified A-22
| ultralights as suicide UAVs"_)
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Unmanned kamikazes?
| jandrese wrote:
| They are just DIY cruise missiles really.
| notahacker wrote:
| None of them remotely resemble an E190 though, which is
| about 50x the size of a cruise missile, communicates
| effectively with air traffic control and broadcasts ADS-B
| signals telling you what it is (at least when you're not
| jamming it...)
| joha4270 wrote:
| Radar doesn't exactly tell you the size of of a contact.
| Sure, you can measure the power of the return signal,
| correct for distance and get something that loosely
| correlates with size. But it correlates much more
| strongly with other things.
|
| You're also making the assumption here that it was a
| modern Russian system. This wasn't exactly close to the
| current fighting, its entirely possible this radar was
| manufactured in the Soviet Union. I don't think those
| receive a lot (or any) civilian broadcasts.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > You're also making the assumption here that it was a
| modern Russian system
|
| People do like to provide their very important opinion
| completely oblivious what Grozny is farther away from eg
| Crimea _than Kiev_.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Since Russia reduced Grozny to rubble relatively
| recently, it's probably not that old.
| joha4270 wrote:
| Most A2A systems has wheels (or floats) and can thus
| easily be relocated. While it probably had good stuff
| once, I think all the high end equipment once located
| here has moved closer to Ukraine by now. What's left is
| probably the worst (human or technological) that's left.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Ukraine uses (among other things) fixed-wing drones
| with similar characteristics to civilian aircraft._
|
| Including taking off from commercial airports on publicly
| available schedules, on predetermined airways/corridors,
| and broadcasting 1080 MHZ ADS-B data?
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > Some of them are _actual_ civilian aircraft,
| retrofitted into unmanned suicide drones
|
| literally small prop planes with guidance systems and
| instead of ~4 passengers it's lots of explosives.
| commonly used against Russian oil depots, etc.
|
| small radar signature, and a lot of ambiguity with
| civilian aircraft.
| Retric wrote:
| Confusion with civilian prop aircraft, not commercial jet
| airliners flying at vastly higher altitude and speeds.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| An E190 on approach (remember, this airplane was trying
| to land at Grozny) has an approach speed between 125-145
| knots (depending on load). A Cessna 172 for example has a
| cruise speed of ~120 knots and can cruise up to 10k feet.
| A typical instrument landing glide path is 3 degrees -
| that intercepts 10k feet at ~60km out.
|
| The likelihood of confusing a regional jet with a small
| prop plane (purely based on speed/heading/altitude) is
| way higher during landing.
| Retric wrote:
| While it crashed near an airport it doesn't seem like the
| aircraft was targeted at low altitude and low speeds.
| sandmn wrote:
| This aircraft was trying to land so it likely had much
| lower altitude and speed than usual.
| Retric wrote:
| It doesn't appear that the aircraft was attacked on final
| approach. Instead flying much higher and faster than prop
| drones.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Wait a minute. I thought they hit some angry birds?
|
| All of these decisions are made by soldiers. Russian air
| defense troops are no doubt overworked, poorly treated,
| under intense pressure and probably motivated by avoiding
| going to the front.
|
| Chances are, an operator or officer made a bad call. They
| are cogs in a killing machine.
| nativeit wrote:
| I would have thought the aircraft's transponder would
| have been the first clue. I can identify nearly every
| aircraft over my house right now using a $30 USB dongle,
| including callsign, airline, flight number, altitude,
| speed, and bearing.
| alxlaz wrote:
| > With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian
| military is, could they really be so far behind that
| they're unable to determine the difference between an
| commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?
|
| It depends a lot on the context (weather, altitude) and
| equipment (Russia has _a lot_ of equipment, some of it
| new, some of it old, some of it ancient).
|
| Without minimizing the personal contribution to this
| disaster of every serviceman, IMHO the blame, first and
| foremost, rests firmly with whoever the bloody hell
| decided to keep the airspace open nearly three years into
| a war. Civilian airspace is open above Chechnya and
| Dagestan while the VKS is lobing missiles from/from above
| the Caspian Sea, and planes are landing at Sochi while
| Novorossiysk gets hit by drones. This is nuts even by
| post-Soviet standards. There's a very good reason why
| Ukraine closed their airspace almost right away and
| continue to keep it closed.
|
| To pre-emptively address the "but that would be too
| costly" angle: well, maybe that should've been factored
| in before greenlighting the invasion. Boo-hoo. Does
| keeping it open look cheap now?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > With zero knowledge of how well-equipped the Russian
| military is, could they really be so far behind that
| they're unable to determine the difference between an
| commercial airlines and a high-speed missile?
|
| In a quick decision, in a high-stress scenario during an
| actual attack, possibly. Even if they have the capacity
| to make that decision correctly otherwise, every system--
| including the human element--is fallible, and procedures
| in those circumstances are likely to err on the side of
| safety-from-attack, rather than safety-for-potential-
| attacker.
|
| (OTOH, the rerouting of the plane afterward was clearly
| intentional murder with the hope it would help cover up
| the shooting incident, whether or not the shooting itself
| was an accident.)
| H8crilA wrote:
| Different types of missiles exist. A cruise missile (for
| which the Russians have a much better name - winged
| missile) can be confused with an airplane, as it is
| essentially a drone with a turbojet engine. A ballistic
| missile travelling at supersonic/hypersonic speeds is much
| easier to discriminate based on velocity alone. Also, those
| are usually tracked all the way from a launch site using
| infrared cameras on satellites. The European incursions
| were mostly cruise missiles and the Iranian mopeds (and at
| least one ballistic incident that was likely a Ukrainian
| air defense S-300 missile that the Ukrainians lost control
| of; this is another problem that happens every now and then
| to everyone).
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Completely irrelevant if there are missiles that fit the
| profile of something else because some fit the profile of
| an airliner end of story
| smegger001 wrote:
| Then you are comfortable making a decision that could
| cost thousands of lives over one with a few hundred
| without taking in any other information other than a
| radar bounce that is approximately the same size/speed.
| H8crilA wrote:
| I mean you're largely correct. What I'm saying is that
| there may be a standing order to destroy all ballistic
| threats, and to exercise a very high degree of caution
| (high level approvals for each engagement) with any
| potential air breathing / subsonic threats. I imagine
| this is a common order given to Patriot batteries in hot,
| but not war, areas.
|
| BTW, this is a bit similar to why the US very clearly
| advertises the Tomahawk as not nuclear capable - so that
| a few subsonic blips do not trigger a strategic exchange.
| The Russians do not do that, many of their commonly used
| missiles are dual purpose.
| perihelions wrote:
| The Tomahawk was deployed with nuclear warheads, in
| several variants, between 1983-2010 or 2013 [0]. As far
| as I can tell, only the ground-launched variants were
| consistently advertised as non-nuclear, and that was to
| comply with the bilateral treaty obligations of the INF
| [1]--and there _was_ a ground-launched nuclear Tomahawk,
| too [2], which was destroyed in 1991 when the INF treaty
| came into effect.
|
| I don't think that there was ever a *unilateral* US
| aversion to these things. We've fielded large numbers [3]
| of nuclear-warhead cruise missiles--air-, sea-, and
| ground-launched, spanning much of the Cold war. We're
| currently developing a new one right now [4].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile_famil
| y)#Vari...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate-
| Range_Nuclear_For...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGM-109G_Gryphon
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nuclear_cruise
| _missil... ( _" Category: Nuclear cruise missiles of the
| United States"_)
|
| [4] https://news.usni.org/2024/06/06/report-to-congress-
| to-on-nu... ( _" Report to Congress on Nuclear-Armed Sea-
| Launched Cruise Missile"_)
| H8crilA wrote:
| Ugh, I was clearly wrong about the Tomahawk, and I don't
| know why I thought so. It's probably not a believable
| story for the adversary, so such self-inhibition cannot
| yield any strategic results anyways.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Are you meaning (for example) old radar equipment with
| generated profiles unable to distinguish between what
| more modern equipment could?
| wat10000 wrote:
| I can think of at least two incidents where the military
| was deciding between downing and not downing an airliner,
| and decided on the former. Oddly, they both involve Korean
| Air and the Soviet military.
|
| One hopes the modern Russian military is less enthusiastic
| about such things, but I wouldn't want to bet my life on
| it.
| ben_w wrote:
| This also occurred at least once with Canada/US military
| (but still Korean aircraft) during the panic on September
| 11, 2001 -- an aircraft that was actually just doing
| normal stuff, very nearly got shot down.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Flight_085
| cperciva wrote:
| I don't know about "nearly got shot down". They were
| escorted to a different airport and ordered to land, but
| despite several miscommunications they followed
| instructions and landed safely.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > One hopes the modern Russian military is less
| enthusiastic about such things
|
| Given that they have just done it again, I'd bet they
| have plenty of enthusiasm.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The past couple of times look likely to be legitimate
| confusion, probably coupled with a lack of care. In the
| KAL shootdowns, the Soviets intercepted, saw that they
| were airliners, and shot them down anyway.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Prigozhin was shot down when on a commercial flight
| wasn't he?
| wat10000 wrote:
| That was a private jet, and probably a bomb planted on
| the plane before flight, although it's hard to say for
| sure.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In the KAL shootdowns, the Soviets intercepted, saw
| that they were airliners, and shot them down anyway.
|
| As I understand the pilot in the KAL 007 shoot down
| claimed that he visually identified the plane as a
| Boeing-type airliner years later, but also claimed he did
| not report that to control because it was not material
| since such aircraft could be readily converted to
| intelligence work which was what was the concern for
| which it was being intercepted. There is no additional
| support for this, and lots of things the pilot claimed
| about the incident are inconsistent with the evidence
| from radar tracks, flight data recorders of the shot down
| plane, and the records of the Soviet communications
| relating to the attack, so this particular unverifiable
| claim probably shouldn't be given much weight.
|
| KAL 902, sure, we know that the pilot identified it as an
| airliner, tried to convince command not to have it shot
| down, but then followed the order to shoot it down.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Is there any doubt that the pilot who intercepted KAL007
| got a decent look at the plane first? It should have been
| pretty obviously an airliner as long as it wasn't miles
| and miles away.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| The heat signature from multiple big turbofan engines and
| the radar signatures for the same could look similar to a
| bomber or cargo military plane, so here again a human needs
| to discriminate somehow.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Humans can't but maybe AIs can coordinate at light speed to
| determine at the last minute if a plane should be shot down
| or not.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Thats not true at all, and I have the receipts to prove it.
| When the Russians shot down KAL007, it was preceeded by
| numerous phone calls and meetings. Russian pilots cannot
| fire missiles without remote authorization from central
| command. The chain of communications is well documented.
| KAL007 was first radar identified and fighters were
| scrambled at 16:33. They obtained visual contact at or
| around 18:05 and reported it to be a potential civilian
| airliner. After much discussion, an order to shoot it down
| was given, which they did, 21 minutes later at as 18:26,
| nearly 2 hours after it was detected on air defence radar.
|
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-shot-in-the-dark-
| the-u...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| KAL 007 was shot down as a suspected spy plane in
| peacetime, not as a suspected attack weapon in war time.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Please don't mistake explanation for excuse.
| simoncion wrote:
| > deconfliction equipment
|
| By this do you mean "electronic warfare" equipment, like
| radar/laser detectors and other such "target searching and
| seeking" detectors, as well as jammers, spoofers, and other
| such "search or seek disruption" devices?
| RealityVoid wrote:
| I think they mean fancy IFF (Identify Friend or Foe)
| emitters. If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a
| problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but
| somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-spoofable
| way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do this. Is there
| any interesting textbook on electronic warfare, I wonder?
| simoncion wrote:
| > Is there any interesting textbook on electronic warfare,
| I wonder?
|
| I know that there are unclassified textbooks on this very
| topic, but I've long forgotten their names.
|
| > If you think about it, it sounds like a pain of a
| problem, the plane must be as stealthy as possible, but
| somehow, during those moments, communicate in a non-
| spoofable way that it's a friendly. No idea how they do
| this.
|
| Well, part of this problem is pretty trivial to solve: if
| you're coming back from a mission and are well in friendly
| airspace, you don't need to be stealthy at all, so you turn
| on your radio transmitters.
|
| It's my understanding that when you're on a mission where
| you need to be as hard to spot as possible, you turn off
| all unnecessary transmitters and rely on Command telling
| Air Traffic Control and other interested parties where
| you're operating so as to reduce the chance that you
| collide with another aircraft and/or get shot down by
| friendlies.
| H8crilA wrote:
| DSSS is magic. Truly. It's like you can create an
| ~infinite number of "new frequencies" to send on, each
| being orthogonal to any other, then chose them
| cryptographically as needed. With enough care it's
| possible to make it difficult for the adversary to even
| detect the presence of a signal. And the tech used by the
| likes of F-35 with MADL and low-probability-of-intercept
| radars may be even fancier than that.
|
| That being said in the Red Sea incident they likely were
| not stealthy at all. For one F-18 has a rather big cross
| section, it's a 4th generation jet. For another the
| Houthis are not known to operate any sensible air defense
| (I may be wrong here, someone please correct me if I'm
| wrong).
| tptacek wrote:
| Any serious hardware Ansar Allah operates is provided by
| Iran, and Iran is not capable of shooting down IAF
| aircraft flying over their own territory. Ansar Allah did
| not shoot down an F-18.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| I don't know either, but thought about it a lot at one
| point.
|
| First, you only respond to correctly encrypted/signed
| requests. Everything else you ignore.
|
| So, second, once you have your valid request, you respond
| to it, also in an encrypted fashion. IIRC F-35 can use
| their radars, with their bean-forming abilities, for
| stealthy comms, sending a very narrow beam of radio signals
| to the recipient.
|
| And if this is fantasy, I suppose by the time you receive
| an IFF query, you know you're about to be shot at. So you
| might as well respond, sacrificing stealth. Hence why you
| want to really be sure you're really asked by your side,
| rather than receiving a spoof request.
|
| Airlines just broadcast a ton of public information about
| themselves, so they don't really need an IFF system. They
| put their hands up and say "don't shoot, I'm a civilian!".
| sokoloff wrote:
| > by the time you receive an IFF query, you know you're
| about to be shot at
|
| I don't think that's the most common case for an IFF
| query. AWACS oversight aircraft likely issue more IFF
| queries than fighter intercepts do. You still want to
| respond to a friendly AWACS inquiry, even though that
| aircraft is 100nm away and no direct/immediate threat to
| you.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 100nm (more or less) is the positive identification radar
| advisory zone for a carrier group airspace... (AKA
| REDCROWN)
| furyofantares wrote:
| Less than 100 nanometers?
|
| It always gets me when someone abbreviates nautical miles
| in lowercase even though context is (almost) always clear
| it can't be nanometers.
| sokoloff wrote:
| An AWACS aircraft within 100 nanometers of you would
| indeed represent a direct and immediate threat. :)
|
| TIL that nm isn't actually accepted as an abbreviation
| for nautical miles. (It's used so commonly in aviation
| that I assumed it was correct and it took me 3 or 4
| searches to accept that this thing I _knew_ was correct
| actually wasn't. Thanks [seriously]!)
| coin wrote:
| Same when people use "mhz" for megahertz
| wbl wrote:
| There are a few from Artech house you can find.
| dh2022 wrote:
| AESA radars send radar impulses on different frequencies
| that appear to the observer to be random (and thus hard to
| figure out and jam).
|
| They could use something similar for communication. Send
| the first byte on a frequency, the second byte on another
| one, etc.... The frequencies could be calculated to be un-
| distinguishable from the background radio radiation. Of
| course, both the sender and the receiver have to agree on
| this mechanism.
| Suzuran wrote:
| I assumed they meant the military transponder and UHF radio
| equipment.
| Qem wrote:
| > This happens everywhere, just the other day an American F-18
| was shot down by an American destroyer in the Red Sea, and an
| F-18 carries additional econfliction equipment that an airliner
| doesn't have.
|
| The Houthis claim the F-18 was downed by them[1], so it's still
| not clear if this was an actual friendly fire incident. This is
| consistent with reports the carrier retreated to northern red
| sea soon after the incident.
|
| [1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241222-yemens-houthis-
| cl...
| amenhotep wrote:
| No, it's pretty clear.
| medo-bear wrote:
| It is as clear as this:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shootdown
| mapt wrote:
| That depends on whether you trust the Houthis or the US
| Navy's sheepish apology for shooting at two F-18s (one
| missed), which will almost certainly have career consequences
| for somebody.
| tesch1 wrote:
| The carrier "retreating" is also consistent with a lot of
| other scenarios, including just having fucked up majorly and
| needing a safe place to spend some quality time yelling at
| people.
| loeg wrote:
| The Houthis have no credibility, so I'm inclined to believe
| the Navy here.
| tptacek wrote:
| They claim a lot of things, but whatever air defense they
| have comes from Iran, and Iran, as we just saw, isn't capable
| of shooting down IAF F-15s flying over their own airspace.
| Ansar Allah did not shoot down an American F-18. I don't
| believe Ansar Allah has any meaningful air defense at all; it
| would make no strategic sense for them to invest in it, they
| have no hope of maintaining air superiority against any of
| their adversaries. Like Hezbollah, which trained them, and
| which also has no meaningful air defense, their strategy is
| to be hard to bomb effectively.
| Ponet1945 wrote:
| The IAF did not fly over Iranian airspace, they launched
| ballistic missiles from Iraq.
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm reading conflicting reports, but let's stipulate
| that; I don't think it makes any difference to the point
| I'm making. The better, clearer example is Lebanon, which
| hosts the crown jewel of the IRGC's proxy forces, and
| which doesn't have even a pretense of modern anti-
| aircraft defense. What would the point be? These are
| territories and militaries without meaningful air forces;
| they have already defaulted away air superiority. Their
| strategy is for that not to matter.
| aryonoco wrote:
| According to BBC Persian (quoting Israeli sources) and
| many Israeli media , the IAF flew "hundreds" of sorties
| over Iranian airspace on that eventful night in October.
|
| The reporting is that they were F35s though, not F15.
|
| Iran's air defence system is based on the older Russian
| S300, which is incapable of detecting them.
|
| Of course it wasn't that long ago that Iran was flying
| F14s and had complete air superiority over its
| neighbours. How the times have changed.
| tptacek wrote:
| I've seen credible reporting of F-35's, F-15's, and
| F-16's, all of which are platforms the IAF operates.
| aryonoco wrote:
| Very possible.
|
| We also now know that the Israelis had informed the
| Iranians just before the attack through diplomatic
| channels of the impending attack, and that it would only
| contain specific military objectives.
|
| Is the S300 just that useless? Possible. Did the Iranians
| decide to not respond and to "take one on the chin" in
| order to avoid a cycle of ever increasing conflict?
| Maybe. Had espionage already disabled Iran's air defence
| system? Also possible. We probably won't know for another
| 100 years.
| tptacek wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think the strike on Iran shed as much light
| on this question as I'd originally thought it might, but
| it still seems clearly to be the case that air defense is
| not a big part of the Axis of Resistance strategy. Ansar
| Allah fought an open war against Saudi Arabia in the mid-
| late 2010s, during which the Royal Saudi Air Force
| routinely flew over Houthi-held territory, and so far as
| I know they've never verifiably shot a flight down.
|
| Again, I think the most useful model here is Lebanon.
| Hezbollah has a desultory complement of SAM launchers,
| but no meaningful control over its airspace.
| aryonoco wrote:
| Oh yes that's just absolutely fanciful boasting by the
| Houthis.
|
| The Houthis were probably not far off from claiming to
| have shot down the Ingenuity chopper which NASA lost on
| Mars . In reality they can't shoot down a Cessna 172.
| tptacek wrote:
| I think they've taken down a couple MQ-9's, at least one
| of which we acknowledged.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| https://archive.li/BM5NB
| e_carra wrote:
| This is just a capture of a captcha
| belter wrote:
| Works on MY machine...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/world/flight-deaths-shot-from-sky-
| rising...
|
| There, a gift link.
|
| You're probably using Cloudflare DNS, it's a known issue
| that's been discussed for years. The archive owner
| deliberately gives bad results to Cloudflare DNS. It's why I
| prefer not to use it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 - 6 year old
| discussion on the topic.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Relevant StackExchange question here[1], asking about counter-
| measures on passenger aircraft, from when MH-17 was shot down.
|
| [1]: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/7768/why-
| dont-a...
| miohtama wrote:
| Also this means Russia is the biggest killer of airline
| passengers?
| varjag wrote:
| Iran had also contributed significantly in 2020. Although their
| regime ended up acknowledging their role, unlike Russia whose
| policy is bold faced lies.
| cyclecount wrote:
| The US has one of the largest contributions of all time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
| varjag wrote:
| Sure, although at the time missiles weren't the biggest
| killer of airline passengers.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| You could argue the US is partly responsible for the 2020
| disaster as well.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_International_Airline
| s...
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Not very seriously.
|
| The Iranians shot down a Ukrainian jet with Russian
| missile. Blaming Americans for the stupidity of Iranians
| is ridiculous.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| Maybe not entirely seriously, but there is a direct
| causative path initiated by the United States that you
| can follow which lead to this result.
|
| Iran shot down this airliner after mistaking it for a
| cruise missile launched by the US, which was arguably a
| credible fear given the events of days prior. If the US
| didn't assassinate Qasem Soleimani (with a drone, near an
| airport), Iran wouldn't have made this terrible error, as
| they would not have made a retaliatory strike.
|
| Additionally, you can go even further back and argue that
| if the US didn't withdraw from the nuclear deal struck in
| 2015, none of these events would have taken place.
| varjag wrote:
| You can also argue if Iran did not have imperialist
| project over neighboring countries this event would've
| also not happened.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| That's not a counter to the parent's point. The parent is
| saying there are many critical factors, one of which was
| the US performing an assassination.
|
| Saying "there were other critical factors" both agrees
| with the parent post and doesn't counter the idea that
| the US was a factor.
| varjag wrote:
| This is absolutely a counter. There would be no
| assassination of an Iranian general in Baghdad had he not
| commanded the insurgency with the sponsored militias in
| Iraq.
| creddit wrote:
| > Maybe not entirely seriously, but there is a direct
| causative path initiated by the United States that you
| can follow which lead to this result.
|
| No, there isn't. There's a direct causative path
| initiated by Xerxes I when he launched the second
| invasion of Greece.
| wat10000 wrote:
| There's a direct causal path from any event to every
| event in its future light cone. You need more than "if
| not X then not Y" to blame Y on X. Otherwise you end up
| with ridiculous things like saying your cat saved your
| life by barfing on the carpet because cleaning it up made
| you late for your bus which crashed.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Using this line of reasoning, you might as well go back
| to Cain and Able.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| If country a starts a war and then country b defending
| itself accidentally shoots down a civilian airliner it's
| ridiculous. It's ridiculous. You're saying it's
| completely ridiculous to blame country a?
| dralley wrote:
| If you qualify country A's actions as "starting a war"
| then country B had started many dozens of wars themselves
| in the previous decade, and subsequent one.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Irrelevant. You may as well walk back to the first mover
| and blame God.
| dralley wrote:
| That's basically my point. Ultimate responsibility lies
| with those who decided to fire a missile at a civilian
| airliner without doing any due diligence or applying
| common sense, not those who "created tension" or whatever
| you want to claim the US did in that situation.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| If the iron dome accidentally shoots down in civilian
| airliner it's 'ridiculous' to blame anyone other than
| Israel was your statement
| dralley wrote:
| I was assuming you were referring to the Ukrainian
| airliner shot down by Iran in the aftermath of the
| Suliemani killing, which is an actual example and not a
| hypothetical one.
| talldayo wrote:
| It is. It's ridiculous when Israel hits aid workers with
| missiles and rockets, it's crazy when people wearing
| press jackets are killed even after communicating their
| position directly to military command and control. It's
| ridiculous when children die early, gruesome deaths
| because they sat next to a bad man with a pager at a
| Lebanese grocery store.
|
| It's not the 1950s anymore, accountable nations are
| expected on the international stage to understand what
| exactly they are shooting at. Israel is under much closer
| scrutiny than Russia because they represent modernized
| doctrine and _should_ be using their technological
| superiority to enable more targeted strikes rather than
| more indiscriminate ones. Modern Russian warfighting
| tactics have been under serious scrutiny since the Afghan
| retreat, then again in the Gulf War, and then again now
| during the retreat from Syria.
|
| The only "clean" war Russia fought in recent years was
| Crimea, which was "won" by lying to the international
| community and breaking their trust forever. As evidenced
| by Ukraine, today's Russian republic cannot win a war
| with tactical prowess alone. The "special military
| operation" has devolved into IRBM fearmongering and
| rattling the nuclear sabre - Putin knows he's not the
| president of a world superpower anymore, he's a Tesco-
| branded Kim Jong-Un.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Yes. We rightfully expect people with guns to have an
| idea of what they are shooting at. Firing wildly at
| anything that moves tends to earn condemnation.
| creddit wrote:
| You could also argue that the earth is flat and lots of
| people do.
|
| No one can rationally argue that that was partly the US'
| responsibility, though.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Except...the US isn't partly responsible.
| ternnoburn wrote:
| No clue why this is being flagged. It's a clear example of
| a SAM being used against passenger aircraft.
| isuckatcoding wrote:
| Because certain countries immediately evoke knee jerk
| reaction. Iran bad. US good. Simple black and white view
| duxup wrote:
| The internal dynamics of different nations is always
| interesting to me. My understanding was that in Iran top
| leadership wanted to maintain the lie but there was a lot of
| resistance within the government, so much so they chose to
| admit it.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| It tells us a lot about their internal power dynamics if
| their top leadership actually listened to the rest of the
| government on this.
| kergonath wrote:
| Iran is governed by factions that are occasionally
| aligned, but can have divergent interests. It's very hard
| to understand recent Iranian history if one assumes that
| a single political entity is in control. I mean, Khamenei
| is nominally in control, but it's not always that tight.
|
| Russia is very different: Putin clearly has absolute
| control over all government entities.
| dgfitz wrote:
| Were that true, I doubt all the bribery and corruption
| would have been allowed to destroy their military
| equipment.
|
| I'm surprised they were able to shoot a plane down at
| all.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Were that true, I doubt all the bribery and corruption
| would have been allowed to destroy their military
| equipment.
|
| I wasn't precise enough. He does not control every
| individual specifically, just all organisations (as in,
| there is none that dares to contradict him, and the
| people in charge who do, don't do it for long).
|
| That's a consequence of the power structure. It is
| optimised to avoid factions and keeping dissenting voices
| under control, but micromanagement has its limits. To
| some extent, corruption also helps in several ways at the
| highest levels. This seems to be one of the reasons why
| they cannot stop it. It enables selective enforcement,
| and is an effective tool to get rid of people who get too
| powerful, too independent, or not obedient enough (there
| are many examples of this in the last couple of years:
| when Putin wants to reshuffle the government he finds
| corruption charges). It seems that this culture spread
| down the ranks and pervades the whole state.
|
| > I'm surprised they were able to shoot a plane down at
| all.
|
| If anything, a civilian aircraft is a sitting duck for
| anti-aircraft missiles: it has no decoys, no flares, no
| jamming or any kind of countermeasures. Surely, not
| shooting it down when firing at it takes some effort.
| Also, we don't know how many missiles were fired.
| echelon wrote:
| Russia (and the USSR) have shot down six passenger airlines so
| far.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_902
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_902
|
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
| (Killing US rep Larry McDonald.)
|
| 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812
| (Joint Russia-Ukraine mission, but it's purported that Russians
| coerced Ukraine into taking the blame.)
|
| 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
|
| 6.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...
| mopsi wrote:
| More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleva_(airplane)
| diggan wrote:
| Luckily, this is probably one of the few variables you can at
| least try to workaround, as you can choose/not choose flights
| that go over/close to warzones/Russia. Compared to unexpected
| issues like the typical Boeing doors falling off, that we as
| passengers can't really try to include when planning where to
| fly.
| janice1999 wrote:
| Normal people do not try to plot the course of their upcoming
| flights and calculate the proximity to the largest country in
| the world which happens to border 14 other countries.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Normal people also do not keep backups of their important
| data.
| cko wrote:
| I consider myself a fairly normal person. On a recent flight
| from Istanbul to Taipei, I checked the flight path to make
| sure it wasn't flying over any "suspect" countries.
| perihelions wrote:
| The airline would need to be deliberately avoiding them:
| the great-arc circle between those two passes directly over
| Grozny. Smart call to double-check that.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Normal people do not try to plot the course of their
| upcoming flights_
|
| I am in India. Everyone is _very_ aware of the Air India
| flights that overfly Russia, Iran, _et cetera_ and those--
| mostly foreign airlines-- who do not.
| epolanski wrote:
| How are planes bound to Russia expected to avoid Russian
| airspace?
| 867-5309 wrote:
| twenty paragraphs in and still no answer to what _was_ the
| Biggest Killer
| eagerpace wrote:
| Gravity
| forinti wrote:
| I once had a chat with a safety analyst for an airline. He
| told me: flying isn't dangerous at all, but taking off and
| landing are.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Taking off isn't even dangerous, it's unintended landings
| shortly after takeoff that cause harm.
| qaq wrote:
| Embraer is very well designed aircraft the fact it was able to
| fly for so long after sustaining so much damage is a testament to
| its robust engineering and design.
| marcodiego wrote:
| ERJ-190 has 0 in-flight deaths caused by aircraft failure. In
| 2006 an Embraer Legacy jet collided mid-air with a boeing 737;
| The boeing fell to pieces, the Embraer landed safely[1]. In
| 2019 an Embraer ERJ-190 flew with misrrigged control cables;
| the aircraft was under extremely high structural load until
| pilots got enough control to land it safely[2].
|
| Embraer engineers are clearly doing something right.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gol_Transportes_A%C3%A9reos_Fl...
| [2] https://aerossurance.com/safety-management/erj190-p4kcj-
| main...
| rodface wrote:
| I won't comment on the robustness of the Embraer
| construction, but I should point out that the 2006 incident
| is not necessarily indicative of that; the two aircraft
| collided head-on, and the relatively fragile vertical winglet
| of the smaller jet severed the outer third of the Boeing's
| wing before breaking away, almost cleanly. The Embraer thus
| was able to continue flying while the 737 was doomed.
| Swapping the positions of the two aircraft would probably
| have produced an opposite outcome.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Wikipedia's account says that the Boeing lost "about half"
| its wing.
|
| Admiral Cloudberg -
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-fickle-hand-of-
| fate-... - says "nearly in half". But from the scaled
| diagram of the collision in that article, your "outer
| third" seems more accurate.
|
| Either way - for anyone familiar with Boeing's WWII bomber
| heritage, the glossed-over assumption that the Boeing's
| situation was hopeless _really_ sticks out.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| Yeah Embraers are widely considered to be the safest aircraft
| in the skies. The E-135/140/145 has literally never had a
| single fatality in over 30 years of flying.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| A few years back I was flying to London, and when I got the
| ticket it was for an Embraer landing in London City Airport.
| I was excited about the airport as after flying many times to
| London it was the only one out of the five nearby airports I
| had never been to, but the aircraft got me nervous: I never
| heard of Embraer and it was smaller (I thought bigger=safer,
| maybe that's still true?) than the usual Airbus and Boeing I
| was using regularly. Ignorance will do that, I wonder if this
| (ignorant customers) is still a factor when airlines buy
| aircrafts.
|
| BTW the airline sadly put me in a different plane to a
| different airport in the last minute, no reason given.
| petesergeant wrote:
| The kind of passenger who knows what kind of jet they'll be
| flying on has probably heard of Embraer. I do think this is
| an impediment to Comac tho
| ReverseCold wrote:
| Most of my flights (within the USA) are on ERJ-175. I even
| switched airlines midway through the year and this was
| still true. I only see Airbus and Boeing for
| transcontinental flights.
| stevesimmons wrote:
| London City Airport (LCY) has a very short runway with an
| approach right next to houses and apartment buildings. If
| the weather is very windy, especially with cross-winds,
| they are quick to cancel or divert flights.
|
| I was once in a plane that had three landing attempts there
| aborted at the last second before eventually diverting to
| Southend Airport. The plane was bobbing around like a cork
| on the end of a string, quite a few passengers were airsick
| from the wild turbulence or screaming hysterically
| convinced we were all about to die.
| CPLX wrote:
| That 2006 incident isn't a good example it's almost entirely
| due to the fact that a non-essential part of the Embraer
| neatly sliced a big chunk of the airliner's wing off.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Probably the only winner in this situation, really.
|
| Makes Boeing look extra crappy given recent events, too.
| ponector wrote:
| Also pantsir is a shitty AA weapon. Like everything designed in
| modern Russia.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| In 2001 we also had Siberian Airlines flight 1812 from Tel Aviv
| to Novosibirsk was shot down by Ukrainian S-200 during a joint
| Russian/Ukrainian exercise!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812
| protomolecule wrote:
| >joint Russian/Ukrainian exercise
|
| Nope, that was Ukrainian exercise
| ponector wrote:
| Any proofs? Everywhere articles says that accident was during
| joint exercise.
| protomolecule wrote:
| They were 'joint' because the Ukraine used a test range in
| Crimea that belongs to Russian Black Sea fleet based in
| Sevastopol. All launches were authorized by Ukrainians,
| Russians fired a single short-range missile and that's it.
| But, yeah, let's call it joint Russian-Ukrainian to shift
| the blame towards Russians.
|
| You can read the details here using google translate if you
| like: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katastrofa_Tu-154_nad_C
| hiornym_m...
| lkbm wrote:
| Using Google Translate on the Wikipedia citation[0]:
|
| > On the Ukrainian website "Maidan-inform" expressed doubts
| about whose arsenal - Russian or Ukrainian - the S-200
| missile was fired. Russian equipment, radar stations and
| warships also participated in the training.
|
| Ukraine shot it down, but it sure sounds like a joint
| exercise.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160508084452/http://2001.no
| vay...
| oneshtein wrote:
| But this plane was not hit by S200 - no S200 parts or hexagen
| was found by Russians at crash site.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > found by Russians
|
| Well there you go, airtight proof.
| chongli wrote:
| What I don't understand is why Russian SAM operators did not
| appear to expect the airliner via its flight plan. Commercial
| flights file flight plans with Air Navigation Service Providers
| (ANSPs). Flights into Russia would almost certainly be filed with
| FATA, the Russian Federal Air Transport Agency.
|
| I see two possibilities: 1) the flight plan was known to the
| officer in charge of the SAM site and he was under orders to
| shoot the plane down and now they're trying to cover it up or 2)
| it was a genuine mistake and so there was some kind of
| miscommunication or perhaps the air defence forces weren't even
| looking at flight plans and just shooting at anything that looked
| suspicious on radar. Gross incompetence and lack of training and
| coordination in the Russian military are all issues we've come to
| expect so it's easy to see how this could happen without knowing
| for sure. And since Russia seems to be in full denial/obstruction
| mode we might never know exactly what went wrong.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I'm going to put my money on gross incompetence and lack or
| training based on videos I've seen of assaults made by soldiers
| using electric scooters and golf carts...
| duxup wrote:
| >incompetence and lack of training
|
| Seems the most likely, for all the usual reasons, and it seems
| pretty clear from recent conflicts that Russia still subscribes
| to the game plan of mass numbers of expendable troops,
| equipment, etc less so well trained.
|
| Probably little choice when you're running a Kleptocracy. It
| appears there's no part of the Russian system immune to
| corruption / etc.
| chongli wrote:
| Right, but doesn't that offer the perfect cover if Putin
| actually wanted someone on that flight killed?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Does he need cover? The windows people keep falling out of
| don't seem very covered.
| chongli wrote:
| A lot of the denials / diversions made by Putin's regime
| can seem absurd to us but we're not necessarily the
| intended audience for them. The regime as a whole has a
| post-truth propaganda MO designed to subvert reality by
| offering competing and contradictory narratives in order
| to sow confusion and distrust.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Last I checked, Embraers don't have operable windows
|
| Boeings on the other hand...
| duxup wrote:
| Shooting down an commercial airliner seems far riskier /
| just more complicated / hassle compared to "typical"
| assassination efforts. It's not as if Russian leadership is
| afraid to do that.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Prigozhin.
|
| Well it was general aviation (another Embraer Jet,
| coincidentally) as opposed to commercial, but close
| enough.
|
| Still the most likely explanation is human error. There
| have been so many shoot downs of airlines across the
| world in the recent past that it is not surprising any
| more.
| philistine wrote:
| Prigozhin was about sending a message, and using a method
| of assassination that ultimately Prigozhin himself could
| not use. Only Putin can kill you with a missile strike.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Why would Putin need that? The plane was literally landing
| in russia. Putin could just have that person be arrested
| then or just disappear ("must have been russian maffia").
| Not like russians try to hide murdering people.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Prigozhin was landing in Russia too.
|
| A half hearted cover for assassination is very Russian.
| Unlikely falls, weird car crashes, novel poisons. It's
| got a long history.
| sandmn wrote:
| Prigozhin was a very different case, not that many people
| have their own paramilitary organization to defend them.
| Only other such person I can think of is someone like
| Kadyrov.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| This is Russia, so assuming malice or incompetence is
| redundant.
|
| But in all likelihood it was a mistake; if they were serious
| about killing it they'd have shot more missiles, and they're
| not in a position to be wasting AAMs on non-military targets.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > they're not in a position to be wasting AAMs on non-
| military targets.
|
| And yet they keep doing it. Accident does seen most likely
| though.
| avaika wrote:
| > he was under orders to shoot the plane down and now they're
| trying to cover it up
|
| I highly doubt that's the case. Even though Russia went full
| evil mode a while ago, it's not that reckless (yet). I don't
| foresee any sane explanation for this kind of order. I believe
| a mistake and/or miscommunication is more likely to be the root
| cause. Sadly it'd be quite naive to expect a thorough publicly
| available investigation summary from Russian side. You are
| right here.
| tucnak wrote:
| > I don't foresee any sane explanation for this kind of
| order.
|
| The "malice/incompetence" heuristic is really a statement
| about prior probability more than anything. Even though it
| may seem as "cautious," or avoiding uncertainty, not updating
| your priors is doing exactly the opposite! You _should_
| assume malice as long as russia is concerned, and it's
| otherwise up to them to prove incompetence. However, like you
| would probably guess, it's in their best interest to
| introduce as much uncertainty as possible. On a different
| note, there's interesting discourse in iterated prisoner's
| dilemma regarding _noise_, or communication error. It
| recognises that any "real" systems is imperfect, and
| therefore will introduce error. I wonder if they ever
| recognised that there's advantage to deliberately introducing
| noise, and falsely attributing it to the system itself!
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| you're assuming this really was Russian, but mossad captured
| several Russian bases/arms depos last weeks.
| rfrey wrote:
| Why would they bother with that, when they have a perfectly
| usable constellation of space lasers?
| mjg59 wrote:
| It sounds like they'd made multiple attempts to land at Grozny
| and failed due to poor weather, were asking to divert back to
| Baku, and due to GPS interference were asking for vectors
| rather than being able to navigate to waypoints on their own.
| They may well not have been anywhere their flight plan would
| have indicated.
| tomohawk wrote:
| After they were shot at, they were not allowed by Russian
| authorities to land in Grozny or any of the other nearby
| Russian airports, but were told to divert across the Caspian
| Sea to another country.
|
| During the crossing, they were subjected to GPS jamming by
| Russia, and damage from the missile caused them to lose most
| controls.
|
| The heroic efforts of the pilots got them almost to the
| airport, but at least some people survived.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > they were not allowed by Russian authorities to land in
| Grozny or any of the other nearby Russian airports
|
| They were not denied landing. It was not possible to land.
| The weather excluded visual approach, there was no ILS and
| landing with GPS wasn't possible due to jamming, which
| started because of the drone attack.
|
| There's fair share of responsibility on Russian air defense
| which has not ensured safety of civilian aircraft, but that
| flight should not have happened in the first place, so
| that's on Russian government which did not close the
| airspace in advance and on the airline which decided to
| continue flights despite that it has already been known
| that air defense us working in the area.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Total speculation but spurious reports of "Ukrainian drone
| attack" sounds suspicious. Would it possible that the
| "attack" was just the involved airliner wandering out of a
| designated safe area and flying into SAM coverage, by chance?
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| for sure a mistake just due to the fact that most of russia is
| incompetent and corrupt. Makes no sense why russia would shoot
| down a plane filled with russian citizens flying to a russian
| airport. Just a fuck up due to russians being incompetent.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| loud assasination with collateral damage to send a message
| lostlogin wrote:
| It would be interesting to know who was in the plane.
| Russia has assassinated this way before with Yevgeny
| Prigozhin.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66599733
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The most salient example of that actually happening was
| with Prigozhin. Still not a full civilian airliner.
| Collateral damage was limited.
|
| If you really want to hate Russia for this, just remember
| that sufficiently advanced incompetence is
| indistinguishable from malice.
| epolanski wrote:
| To whom?
| ibejoeb wrote:
| According to the latest reporting, the actual flight deviated
| from the advance flight plan by hundreds of miles. I don't know
| the regs in that region, but I suspect that IFR flight plans
| must declare an alternate, and it's unclear if it was
| Makhachkala and, if so, why they crossed the sea instead.
|
| That seems to have been the real problem. Russia was not
| anticipating airline traffic there. Sounds like there has been
| fairly active drone activity in that area.
|
| update: Another comment suggested a plausible different order
| of events: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42521882
| sfilmeyer wrote:
| >That seems to have been the real problem
|
| The real problem here is starting a war. In a more peaceful
| context, even being hundreds of miles off from your flight
| plan wouldn't have resulted in this plane getting shot down.
|
| I get what you're saying, though. It sounds unlikely that
| shooting this plane down was done because anyone specifically
| wanted to shoot down this particular civilian plane.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Suspecting it's because of active EW jamming of GPS bc the
| airport was under drone attack. They probably don't have flight
| plans live feed at individual SAM crew level and confirm via
| ADSB feed instead which was way off here. So once it descended
| bellow certain FL it was misidentified as drone by the local
| Pantsir crew
| uxhacker wrote:
| https://archive.is/Gp05K
| buildsjets wrote:
| [flagged]
| echelon wrote:
| The Russians / USSR have shot down six passenger aircraft
| resulting in partial or total loss of life.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_902
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_902
|
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007
| (Killing US rep Larry McDonald.)
|
| 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812
| (Purported that Russians coerced Ukraine to take the blame.)
|
| 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
|
| 6.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...
| protomolecule wrote:
| >Purported that Russians coerced Ukraine to take the blame.
|
| Now that was funny.
| nothal wrote:
| I think a fundamental part of the reasons that Russia and the
| West cannot seem to escape a death-march to war is that
| Russia is so often conflated with the USSR. They are
| ideologically and politically distinct entities, even as much
| as some in the current state of Russia might wish for the old
| days.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Russia legally declared itself a successor to USSR, took
| the UN seat, nuclear weapons, assumed debt and foreign
| assets, kept contacts with former communist allies like
| Cuba, so it's not completely wrong. The topic of admission
| of Russia to NATO demonstrates this very well: Putin
| thought that Moscow is peer to Washington D.C. and needed
| special invitation (as if USSR resolved hostilities and
| wanted to partner with the Western bloc). NATO was treating
| him like any other country in Eastern Europe: apply and we
| will think about it -- didn't even bother to formally
| invite (IIRC Stoltenberg basically said in one of the
| interviews that even if the door was closed, the doorbell
| was working).
| etc-hosts wrote:
| Interesting, I did not know Russia assumed almost all of
| the USSR debt
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10nnw9s/c
| omm...
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Conflated? Russia literally declared itself the successor
| state of the USSR and assumed the latter's position on the
| UN Security Council.
| glogla wrote:
| It is not that Russia is USSR, it is that USSR was Russia +
| colonized, enslaved nations, like Russian Empire before it.
|
| The evil of USSR did was because Russia was in charge.
| int_19h wrote:
| There was never such a thing as a Russian state that
| didn't include colonized neighbors.
|
| Even if you unwind all the way to the Grand Duchy of
| Moscow, we'd have to talk about Kazan etc.
| nine_k wrote:
| How about Novgorod, which was a member of the Hanseatic
| Union back in the day, among other things?
| epolanski wrote:
| I think this is highly debatable, as even the European
| part of Russia hosted no less than dozens of different
| ethnicities. What you say makes little sense in the
| context of Russian and generally eastern European
| history.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| I'd reserve the word ,,colony" for its original meaning.
| USSR was a dictatorship, but not a colonial state. As a
| matter of fact it even prioritized the reduction of
| inequality between the republics of the union for several
| decades.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Russia and the West cannot seem to escape a death-march
| to war is that Russia is so often conflated with the USSR.
|
| Do you think that invading your neighbours might be a
| contributing factor? We are in a thread about Russia
| shooting down an airliner, again. It's pretty amazing to
| claim equal culpability here.
| oneshtein wrote:
| IMHO, Polish president plane should be counted too. It looks
| like pilots were tricked by Russians to descent to 50 meters
| instead of safe 100 meters.
| mulmen wrote:
| Both of those altitudes seem extremely low. I'm not
| familiar with this incident, can you provide more details?
| vinckr wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster
| etc-hosts wrote:
| If you read this long, allegedly well researched piece:
|
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/all-the-presidents-
| men-t...
|
| tl;dr:
|
| "Amid the endless political struggle, it is easy to lose
| perspective on the Smolensk Air Disaster as, first and
| foremost, a plane crash. Had the President not been on
| board to politicize the tragedy, it would have been obvious
| to everyone that the flight that day was a disaster waiting
| to happen. A poorly trained and unqualified crew was
| charged with flying VIPs into an ill-equipped, decrepit
| airport amid extremely dense fog."
| ajuc wrote:
| This is strongly politicized in Poland, there have been
| many commissions and expertises, and despite most Poles
| thinking all the worst about Russia - majority (me
| included) does not believe it to be on purpose.
| gregw134 wrote:
| From the Korean air incident: "As a result of the
| incident...President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making
| American satellite-based radio navigation Global Positioning
| System freely available for civilian use, once it was
| sufficiently developed, as a common good."
| mppm wrote:
| Americans [1][2] and pilots [3][4][5] are not that far behind,
| though.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302
|
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370
|
| 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
|
| 5.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Eastern_Airlines_Flight_...
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Huh? You're comparing engineering failures to _firing
| missiles at civilians?_
| subarctic wrote:
| That's kind of the point of the article isn't it? Comparing
| different causes of passenger deaths?
| mppm wrote:
| All a matter of perspective. Those "engineering failures"
| were in fact a case of criminal negligence which, by the
| way, none of the actually responsible people has gone to
| jail for. As for "firing missiles at civilians", this
| latest incident reportedly happened to a rerouted plane, in
| airspace that was being actively contested by enemy drones
| at that time. Not saying that this isn't a tragedy, or that
| the Russian military is not to blame, but there are also
| lots of blanket allegations and generalizations thrown
| around in this thread, that just seem out of place in a
| supposedly discerning and intelligent community.
| loeg wrote:
| > In 1983, a Soviet fighter plane shot down a Korean Air Lines
| Boeing 747 that had strayed into Soviet airspace during a tense
| period of the Cold War, killing all 269 onboard.
|
| Not the only Soviet shootdown of a KAL flight, either:
|
| > Korean Air Lines Flight 902 (KAL 902) was a scheduled Korean
| Air Lines flight from Paris to Seoul via Anchorage. On 20 April
| 1978, the Soviet air defense shot down the aircraft serving the
| flight, a Boeing 707, near Murmansk, Soviet Union, after the
| aircraft violated Soviet airspace.
|
| Happily, less deadly:
|
| > The incident killed two of the 109 passengers and crew members
| aboard and forced the plane to make an emergency landing on the
| frozen Korpijarvi Lake.
| epolanski wrote:
| The first one was a tragic accident, but it is hard to blame it
| on the Russian defense.
|
| The airplane entered heavy militarized Soviet airspace at a
| time of intense exercises that was known to be off limits by
| KAL, the soviets tried to contact and warn the airplane
| multiple times and intercepted it twice till the airplane was
| shoot down.
|
| This also came in the context of US spy airplanes flying in the
| area having already poked and embarrassed Soviet air defense in
| the same weeks.
| ein0p wrote:
| There's a lot of confusing info about that incident still. You
| typically do not get to fly for 2 hours after an AD hit (if
| that's what it was), nor can you actually make several attempts
| at landing. In this case there were several video recordings from
| the inside while the plane was already in distress. Not one said
| anything about AD hit. Nor did the pilots say anything about
| that. In some photos you can also see the holes petaling
| _outward_ indicating either a straight-through penetration, or
| internal explosion. The whole thing is confusing AF, and people
| are jumping to conclusions. The only thing I can think of is
| perhaps some sort of an AD cannon shot at it, but even then e.g.
| Pantsir AD cannon (if that's what it was) would almost certainly
| be loaded with HE or fragmentation rounds (which wouldn't
| penetrate straight-through), and the altitude would have to be
| sub-4km. What looks pretty certain is that it wasn't a "missile".
| Most likely the plane would disintegrate in the air in this case,
| and if not, we'd know from the people inside the plane.
| pja wrote:
| The IL-2 that was hit by a Ukrainian SAM system & managed to
| land afterwards had a very similar damage pattern to this
| aircraft. You absolutely can fly for hours after an AD hit, if
| you get lucky.
|
| A proximity fused AD missile with a fragmentation charge will
| explode to the rear of a large airliner if it's tail-chasing,
| resulting in exactly the kind of damage we see in both that
| IL-2 and this case.
| ein0p wrote:
| I guess we'll see in a few weeks. Kazakhstan is not Russia,
| and as far as I can tell access to the site of the crash is
| being given to the involved parties, including Azerbaijan.
| Azerbaijan says the cause was "external technical influence",
| whatever that means. And in any case, there are plenty of
| survivors, and, therefore, direct witnesses.
| ikrenji wrote:
| how many times in life do you experience AD hits from within a
| plane as a pilot/passenger? how would they know what to expect?
| it's clear that the missile hit the back of the plane (tail /
| fuselage), how would the pilot know whats happening besides
| losing hydraulics?
| ein0p wrote:
| AD rocket, by design, inflicts catastrophic damage even on
| military aircraft that have far better survivability. Even
| 10K rounds per minute autocannon of the Pantsir would
| generate such a dense cloud of shrapnel it'd be difficult to
| mistake it for "birds", especially for the pilots.
| ikrenji wrote:
| the plane probably got hit by a pantsir missile, not
| autocannon fire. the damage is consistent with a proximity
| fuse warhead detonation. mh17 had exactly the same type of
| holes, except the buk missile is more powerful...
| ein0p wrote:
| That'd be a first, if that's the case. To the best of my
| knowledge to date there haven't been any other cases
| where a civilian plane was hit by an AD missile and
| continued to fly. I can't find anything on Google either.
| The closest thing we got is flight TWA 840 in 1986 on
| which flew with a gaping hole in the fuselage, but that
| wasn't AD:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_840_bombing
| ikrenji wrote:
| well then it's a first. i don't find it that unbelievable
| that a missile detonates near a plane and damages it but
| not enough for it to immediately crash...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 flew
| for about an hour with no hydraulics at all with a very similar
| damage pattern.
| epolanski wrote:
| The damage on the fuselage seems very similar to MH17.
|
| My understanding is that these kind of missiles explode near
| the aircraft, sending hundreds of small metal balls in all
| directions which eventually hit critical parts of the aircraft.
|
| Also, considering how quickly Russians tried to say it wasn't
| them is generally a good indicator of them being involved.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| *russian missiles
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Are you sure it's still true if you limit to Russia? 1/3 of the
| deaths came from Iran, for example
| okasaki wrote:
| American bombs are the biggest killers of children.
| tgv wrote:
| I'm pretty sure malnutrition/poverty by far outrank them.
| gavindean90 wrote:
| Taking a step back from the current incident which is obviously
| tragic, this is both a testament to how safe flying is and how
| hard it is to trust human judgment to tell one radar blip from
| another. At least with some earlier incidents there was less easy
| ways to check on the flight. The iron curtain was still up and
| ADS-B transponders weren't invented. And yet still, here we are
| with planes getting shot out of the skies.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| Just so that there isn't any confusion what russia is all about:
|
| https://youtu.be/_9olGWX-1eI?si=MS4--_WH96BEjiSN
|
| Very appropriate in light of the topic.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| This looks like a joke to me.
| zh3 wrote:
| Is this true? I don't have access to the article, but the Boeing
| crashes and other general loss of control/CFIT must account for a
| large percentage. Only stats I could find with a quick search are
| from Airbus who say LOC is the leading cause over the past 20
| years (I can see enough of the WSJ article to see it says
| "...from 2014", so a decade and not like for like).
|
| _Edit: Possibly the linked stats exclude deliberate acts -
| wikipedia expands on this [1] [2]_
|
| [0] https://accidentstats.airbus.com/accident-categories/
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden...
| gavindean90 wrote:
| I know that it was number three as it a few weeks ago
| otaksu wrote:
| [flagged]
| int_19h wrote:
| None of this is new. A meme with this exact scenario has been
| circulating on Russian social media since 00s.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I can't read the article, but what about DVT (deep vein
| thrombosis)? wouldn't be surprised if it kills more.
| jmward01 wrote:
| This problem shows how antiquated military systems and thinking
| really are. Tracking, identifying and deciding on how to act for
| every thing in the sky, especially things advertising what they
| are from the second they take-off until they land, shouldn't be
| this hard. I for one am glad that militaries are actually so bad
| at their jobs that this can happen. Just imagine how scary they
| would be if they were actually good at this type of thing.
| skc wrote:
| The safety of air travel should be lauded as one of mankind's
| greatest achievements.
|
| I'm infinitely more anxious driving home from the airport than at
| any time in the air.
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