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.
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.
So there was no flight plan, or the Russians didn't read it?
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.
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.
If you really want to hate Russia for this, just remember that sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
The more you read about it, the more you become in disbelief. If it was an operation, it is one of the most advanced ones that I've ever read about. They knew exactly how to deactivate beacons, avoid military radar, there was a power and communications outage (computer interference?), the airplane kept flying for another 7 hours (without detection!), there was no distress call, ... and so on, which cumulatively is extremely unlikely to occur by chance, and would speak to extremely knowledgeable and capable agents. The bodies were never found, so it is possible that the passengers were offloaded. Imagine going to those lengths just to capture one person, or a group? The only other time I've seen that level of coordination was with Edward Snowden.
Quite a big "if". I don't know of any reason to believe it was anything other than one insane pilot. One of the other things your "operation" has to do is plant the flight plan on the pilot's PC.
From my perspective, it's unusual to commit suicide in such a silent way, with such elaborate attention to detail. He could have killed the copilot, and had knowledge about disabling beacons, perhaps also about avoiding radar detection. But why? As an elaborate prank in creating the greatest mystery in aviation history?
Hijackings are usually far more loud. Distress calls, passengers contacting loved ones, a manifesto is published, or the airplane is destroyed defiantly (GermanWings, Q400 2018 incident, ...).
Everything about it is extremely unusual.
Of course you have to evaluate the facts yourself, but it's healthy to have some critical perspective.
You can have defectors internally in the country. In Russia, defectors have a tendency to fall out of a window, regardless of who might be walking on the street (collateral damage).
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.
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.
Boeings on the other hand...
A half hearted cover for assassination is very Russian. Unlikely falls, weird car crashes, novel poisons. It’s got a long history.
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.
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!
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.
And yet they keep doing it. Accident does seen most likely though.
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.