Re:Don’t Blame Malaysia Airlines
by konstruktor on Saturday July 19, 2014 @01:27PM
(#8058106)
What would be needed are not simple checks, but thorough research, which in turn would require reliable local intelligence. The kind one could expect the organisation responsible for ATC to have access to, as opposed to an airline based far, far away.
Sounds dicey. Typical rebels use MANPADS, which have max ranges around 2-4 miles, too small to hit an airliner at cruising altitude. Missile systems with longer ranges tend to be bigger and more complex, and mostly used by well-trained soldiers in proper national militaries who know better than to target airliners. It seems that we have an exception to that here, but it still looks like it was reasonable to assume that they'd be safe.
“Typical rebels” might be unlikely to be able to shoot down a high-altitude plane. But the rebels in Eastern Ukraine had just demonstrated that they could shoot down a plane at 21000 ft. With that information who would conclude that there was less than a 1% chance the rebels were capable of downing a plane at 33,000 ft?
And even the most well-trained military force in the world has shown that it can mistakenly target civilian planes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
The simplest research would have told Malaysia Airlines that (a) rebels were shooting down planes in Eastern Ukraine with surface to air missiles; and (b) some surface to air missiles can reach 40,000 feet. Those two facts alone indicate that the region was not safe for commercial airliners.
If all airlines flew through Eastern Ukraine then they are all guilty of abdicating their responsibility to make simple checks about the safety of their flights.
It is not acceptable to say that air traffic authorised the flight. In the cockpit the co-pilot is trained to question the judgement of the pilot. In the same way Malaysia Airlines should have performed simple checks on the information supplied by the air traffic authorities.