If you assume the person operating it is an intelligent and trained individual, then yes.
If they are an ideological zealot in a monkey/gun situation, not so likely.
If you assume the person operating it is an intelligent and trained individual, then yes.
If they are an ideological zealot in a monkey/gun situation, not so likely.
Black box has been found -- now the separatists are refusing anyone from investigating the area.
Everyone involved with flying commercial airliners over the area has been holding press releases that they will no longer fly over said space ever again.
What a political scandal this is turning out to be.
leave 7th fleet and go to 5th, they said. should be relatively peaceful, they said. god damnit
Pretty likely that individuals on either side of the fight have a fair share of SAMs. Wouldn't just chalk it up to Russia for that specific reason, anyways. Airliners don't exactly have countermeasure systems in place to deal with these sort of things, so it could be a very old SAM, not even something that advanced. Chances are they never even knew it was coming. This is just a ridiculous thing to happen, and the person responsible needs to be shot in the face with his own device.
From what I've read it would actually have to be pretty advanced to shoot down a liner @ 33,000 feet. They identified the type it was Buk SAM:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buk_missile_system
They are old but apparently fairly old but no idea if they've been upgraded.
Depends on the missle systems that was used.
If it was an ARM system, then all it saw was a sourse transmission and it could track it in. These missles have no active emission and can only be seen on radar. By and large, their radar cross section is fairly low.
If it was an active seeker, then it would have been furiously slamming the plane with a emissions to keep updating its flight profile. I have no idea if commercial planes have the capability of detecting this, but would expect it in at least some capacity.
If it was a beam rider, then 1) the range was small and 2) whoever operated it knew damn well what it was targeting. These are the real world version of that hollywood "using a dot to light a target up" thing you see in movies but much more sophisticated. Anything in the last 20 years isn't using visible light anyway.
It will come down to the system used and the training level of the operators. An ARM system is going to be my guess. System just detects something "up there" and if the operator is not knowledgeable of missle sytems, radar systems and the particular system hes on, he can just fire it at anything that makes a noise. ARMs are truly fire-and-forget systems. And unless you knew it was coming and set EMCON (EMissions CONtrol, you shut down all your radar systems so it has nothing to ride in on), then there was nothing the pilots could do.
EDIT: FUCK!! Its the Buk system. Ok, these things are ACCURATE. It's like a russian ripoff/mobile version of the USN's SM-3. They were designed to take down anything that hit their AOR. The command mondule uses a...Telstar? Telsar...something like that system that has an exceedingly large range considering the size of the radar employed. Official reports are 18-22miles but thats bullshit. Its range is 25m+ and excess of 75k feet. Its fast too. From time of aquisition to firing is something on the order of 20-25seconds.
Short version: it was aimed and it was guided to target. This wasn't an accident of "we fired it and couldnt stop it." No, this was guided in.
So with it being a Buk, would they have known it was a commercial flight?
Radar SAMs don't detect radars and aim for them... They have their own radar homing system which gets pings and directs the missile where to go. Some missiles (in this case, this missile) has a semi-active radar homing guidance. Meaning it gets pings off what it's headed towards, and the system on the ground tells the missile to adjust accordingly. This is why you see people use chaff against them. The missile bites off on the big spot in front of it (the chaff). But you are right, an inexperienced and undertrained operator could potentially not understand what he's firing at.
And yeah, Dantrag, I found that after I posted, too. The SA-11 (Buk system) was apparently used. Still pretty old, and there is an updated version (SA-17).
I probably shouldn't put on the tin foil hat, but does this mean it is possible the last malaysian plane was shot down, too? Or at least was sabotaged by the same people who did this?
So fucking sad these people died, and so fucking sad I feel this is just going to lead to more deaths.
??
(I don't watch CNN)
gdi ksandra
Separatists in boats?