Malaysia Airlines Flight Highlights Threat To Aircraft Over Ukraine
As the world seeks answers for why Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 went down over Ukraine on Thursday, Vox reports that it was not the only plane to be shot down in the country’s airspace this week.
Max Fisher points to an Antonov AN-26 military transport plane that was shot down over eastern Ukraine on Monday while flying at 21,000 feet — “far beyond the range of a shoulder-fired system like the MANPADS” that took down military planes last month.
That incident came a day after Moscow threatened “irreversible consequences” over an alleged cross-border shelling that killed at least one Russian, as we reported at the time. Ukraine and Russia traded accusations of responsibility, a now-familiar pattern that has played out in the wake of the Malaysian Airlines incident Thursday.
Following Monday’s shoot-down, BBC News‘ David Stern called it “potentially a game changer” which required deeper Western involvement, similar to the calls that have come since MH17 went down. The difference, of course, is that now a civilian passenger plane carrying hundreds of citizens of countries not part of the Russia-Ukraine conflict has become an unwitting casualty.
As Vox‘s Fisher notes, whoever shot down the Malaysian Air jetliner almost certainly did so with the kind of heavy artillery a professional military would have access to and knowledge about usage.
“It seems most likely that whoever fired on MH17 probably thought they were shooting at another Ukrainian military plane, not realizing it was a civilian airliner,” Fisher writes.
Business Insider‘s Jeremy Bender explains just how dangerous Ukraine’s airspace has become this summer:
“Armed with Man-Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS), the separatists have been taking down Ukrainian military aircraft since the beginning of June. On June 13, separatists shot down a Ukrainian transport plane that had been carrying 40 paratroopers and nine crew members.
“At least 10 other Ukrainian aircraft — all of them significantly lower-flying than a Boeing 777 — have been shot down since the rebels started using MANPADS according to a count kept by military aviation expert David Cenciotti, including five Mi-24 Hinds, two Mi-8 helicopters, one An-2, one An-30, and the Ukrainian transport plane.”
MH17 was different in that it was a passenger Boeing 777 rather than a military plane, but it was clearly flying into a danger zone for aircraft. So why did it?
According to Wired, aviation officials had considered the situation and adjusted accordingly. The problem was that, given the insurgent quality of the conflict, threats to commercial jetliners flying at or above 30,000 feet were not considered serious.
Wired‘s Alex Davies and Jordan Golson say that while there is “a well-established system” for dealing with potential threats to aircraft,
“[I]n cases of military risk, flight restrictions often apply only under certain altitudes. Planes are most exposed to ground-level threats when they’re taking off and landing—that’s when they’re within range of small arms and shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles (this is why the FAA recommends planes avoid Kenya). It requires much more sophisticated weaponry to take out a plane flying 33,000 feet above the ground. The risk posed by that kind of military hardware explains why almost no one flies over Syria—a full-blown war zone—or North Korea.”
But after Thursday’s tragedy involving Malaysia Airlines MH17, that kind of higher-level threat appears very real in Ukraine, so commercial airlines are now avoiding the country.
[Photo: IB Times]
