re: Malaysian Airliner with 295 people on board shot down by SAM missle

Well somebody commented earlier that the locals were looting the place. So, maybe he's there for that?

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pro-Russian military group gonna scoop all this up and we'll never get to the bottom???

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This is what i think will happen.

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if you have nothing to hide WHY IN THE frick do you need a strapped military guy guarding wreckage

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More info in 1 OT post than 2 hours of cnn

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yeah but that guy im sure has more of an agenda than keeping looters out

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The imagery. Not the plain crash

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My new favorite news channel. Lifenews.RU

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Have dealt with similar in the Navy and you have auto track, assisted and manual control. Unless we were doing training exercises it was left in manual. My assumption is that the plane was shot down deliberately. Why they shot it down, no idea, but it's definitely not something you accomplish by accident. A lot goes into play when targeting, tracking and firing.

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Finally some reason and experience closing the "whoops" factor.

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Which is an exceedingly stupid type of missile to launch in these circumstances.

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Not really. The seeker head of an IR guided missile has a very limited field of view and the weapon has a limited range. Unless the airliner was in VERY close proximity to another target, an IR missile's no threat at all. It isn't going to sit around all day waiting from something to fly by.

Having said that, if it was a shoot down it was almost certainly a radar guided missile. The airliner was at 33,000 feet, which is far outside the engagement envelope of all but a few SAM systems and those that can reach that altitude are all radar guided (or radar guided for most of the flight with some other form of terminal guidance).

Also, the reports I've seen are saying it was a Buk (SA-11) system and those are semi-active radar homing missiles.

The fact that the airplane might have come down partially under control doesn't say anything about the potential weapon used. It could have easily been damaged by a proximity detonation as opposed to a direct hit. Most modern SAM warheads are designed for proximity detonation because a shotgun blast has a better chance of scoring a hit than a rifle bullet.

This Ukrainian official on cnn sounds like they have evidence of these guys talking about shooting this plane down over cell phone, etc.

If true, there it is.
We'll see if they do indeed have that