A rebuttal to this argument is found on the last paragraph of this [1] article:
"Malaysian officials said an airline could not be expected to have the intelligence information and other resources to make independent determinations to avoid an area where air traffic controllers were still sending planes. But some carriers had already done just that. China Airlines, the flagship carrier of Taiwan, said that it had avoided flying over all of Ukraine since April 4. Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines also confirmed that they had not flown planes through Ukrainian airspace since March 3."
It also looks like Air France and British Airways avoided Ukraine entirely [2]
And even if all airlines had made the mistake of flying over Ukraine, it is absurd to suggest that an airline might not have the "intelligence information and other resources" to make an independent judgement about safety. A single person spending half an hour on the internet would determine that (a) the rebels were shooting down planes using surface-to-air missiles; and (b) there are some surface-to-air missiles that can reach an altitude of 40,000 feet. That is all the information you need to conclude that the area isn't safe for commercial airplanes.
The people gathering that kind of intelligence are a secretive bunch. As a civilian, you don't "have" that kind of information, you are only provided with it when somebody thinks that's a good idea. If the British, Chinese and Korean services, for example, knew about a big risk for commercial aviation (plausible), why didn't they share it with the entire commercial aviation community? Sounds a bit like they gave that information to their national carriers, together with an NDA. If that is the case, the British services will have to answer some very tough questions (9 British are dead).
I didn't catch the entire interview, but I caught this... "expert comment", I guess I should call it, on PBS's "News Hour" yesterday. Heavily paraphrased:
The ceiling of the exclusion zone was 32,000 feet. The plane was flying at 33,000 feet. Pilots like to maintain significant buffers. As a pilot, I would be very uncomfortable with 1000 feet of buffer. If an incident occurs that requires manoeuvring, e.g. a mechanical incident, 1000 feet is very little room.
P.S. I'm not speaking to the accuracy of the numbers cited. They are what I heard the person say.
As a Russian, I'd like to say I'm deeply sorry for the losses of passengers' families. Whoever did this is a complete monster. Many russians do not support any war or aggression against Ukraine and many are convinced, that Russian government is in some way responsible for this tragedy.
I personally believe we, as people, will never know the truth as to who did it - was it Ukrainians or the rebels or the Russians. However, this is the direct result of the existence of states and governments. We are taxed to build weapons and go to war for some private and corporate interests we have nothing in common with. Those weapons were built for our money. If each and every person was asked separately "would you like to give us 10% of your income to build these deadly weapons and support the rebels in Ukraine or would you like to keep this money for your family" nobody would give it away voluntarily. Taxation and states are at the root of this evil and it is at moments like these that I can see it as clear as ever.
I'm going to take issue with that taxation and states being the root of evil. They are an inevitable result of the way that we humans are. If anything is evil, it's human nature itself.
There are always going to be people who want to form organizations, leadership cabals, and have control over things. Even areas already under the control of a strong Government still have corporations, criminal gangs, and various types of civil organizations, all vying for a little bit of that control pie.
Essentially, there will always be some sort of government. It can be a single one that's powerful enough to be unquestionably dominant over anything it chooses to touch, or it can be dozens of little ones, all vying for control over various things in various places. That essentially looks like Somalia or Syria or Libya - total chaos, with constant risk of offending one warlord or another or some gang of bandits, and none of them will make the slightest pretense of listening to you. Avoiding that requires having one government with enough power to squash anybody like that. The best we can get is to have one dominant government, set up in such a way that it has some degree of obligation to listen to the population.
>I personally believe we, as people, will never know the truth as to who did it - was it Ukrainians or the rebels or the Russians.
Is this really disputed? There are people with agendas trying to spin it one way or the other, but given that the rebels initially claimed responsibility for it, and the fact the Russians probably wouldn't make this mistake (it's easy to check if something is a commercial aircraft), it looks almost certain it was the rebels mistaking the airliner for a military plane.
I doubt you'd be here using the internet at all if humans didn't cooperate and form governments together. For all the atrocities caused by nations, saying we should all live as anarcho-savages isn't a solution.
I agree. The point of a state should only be about who has responsibility for building the roads and such in that area. Why anyone would kill people to have more roads to pave alludes me (actually, I do know why, but their reasons are not resonating with me).
Personally, I don't see any reason to blame them for either crash. As far as I can tell, pretty much every airline in the world thought that the corridor they were flying over eastern Ukraine was perfectly safe. That flight just had the bad luck to be there at the time some marginally-competent Ukrainian rebel in charge of a high-end anti-aircraft missile system got a little enthusiastic. Could have been any other flight just as easily.
We still don't have any idea what happened to that flight 370, either.
I don't think this will help them, though. I sure wouldn't buy any stock in anything connected to them. Even if nothing about either crash was their fault in any reasonable way, people remember stuff like that.
high-end anti-aircraft system can't be operated by a bunch of drunk wannabe rebels, you need entire support unit of radar observation and command(read on wikipedia what is a BUK battery). stealing that one sorry BUK vehicle would just make it shoot in random direction into the ground not at high speed, high altitude target.
Even if it is true that all airlines thought it was safe, I don't see how that is a valid defence.
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.
FWIW, the NYT's news section has a more detailed examination of the politics and technicalities here...and the OP (who is writing in the opinion section)...seems kind of weak:
I would've posted this link had I seen it earlier...but it is interesting to see how the OP, a pilot himself, thinks MH17 didn't have much cause to change its route. I mean, the OP even acknowledges that the Malaysian Air pilots would've known about the Ukranian cargo plane that was shot down earlier that day...in the NYT news report linked above, the 32,000-ft-restricted altitude left planes exposed to rockets that could strike at twice that height.
Thanks, this article answers some of the questions that were left in my mind from the op-ed, which I was surprised it hadn't discussed. After reading the op-ed, it was unclear to me if lots of airlines were flying through this space, or if Malaysia Airlines was unique in doing so. The way it was written almost made me suspect he was defending Malaysia Airlines for having made an unusual decision to fly through space that other airlines were more prudently avoiding. But the article you link here mentions that flight traffic above 32,000 feet was not much down from pre-restriction levels, so Malaysia Airlines seems to have been doing what was the norm.
While it's nice to think that airlines can just rely on regulators to tell them which flight paths might be unsafe, the reality is that there's no international regulatory agency governing acceptable flight paths. There's a regulatory agency for every country and while one country might have stringent safety measures, another might not.
In such an environment it seems naive for an airlines to not include the safety of the flight path in their calculations. If all civilian flights below 32K feet are forbidden by the Ukrainian authorities, that doesn't automatically mean that flying just 1000 feet above would be safe. Also while other airlines are guilty of flying over war zones too, that doesn't mean Malaysian airlines is not.
It doesn't follow automatically, but given the specific limit, one would assume that it was deliberately chosen and includes an error margin. There's nothing wrong with flying at their assigned altitude, which was above the limit.
In aviation, you have to manage risks, you cannot avoid them entirely. For example, there are different levels of redundancy, depending on how critical a system is. There may be two, three or maybe four units, but there surely aren't 25 units of even the most critical equipment - the plane would be too heavy to take off. At some point, you have to decide what the acceptable risk is, and go with that. I think your argument has a strong hindsight bias.
> After each crash, disaster or terrorist episode, it is natural to point fingers and say, Why didn’t we foresee that specific threat? Thus one attempted shoe bombing leads to a decade of shoes-off orders in security lines. The truth is that air transportation, like most other modern systems, could not operate if it fortified itself against every conceivable peril.
Many people like to use phrases like "one $INCIDENT is one too many". In reality, all of life is about balancing and mitigating risks. Just because a single failure happened in one case doesn't mean the entire system is faulty; given enough time, any system that is not 100% foolproof (that is, all of them) is going to have a failure. The question is whether it is actually feasible and/or reasonable to prevent those.
Interesting report on the flight path on BBC news yesterday - they showed that most European airlines flew directly over Ukraine ... British Airways however, have been skirting the country entirely, either going North or South depending on available corridors.
That could just be the usual British "better safe than sorry" mentality, but I suspect they were perhaps given intelligence that suggested unstable rebels had access to SAMs.
There was an even more interesting report (from the FlightRadar) on the flight path of the plane than was downed. It basically veered off its standard course that was going to the left and under the rebel territory and right over the rebel territory.
Couple this with some reports that the plane was escorted by Ukrainian fighter jets at some point and it stops looking as a clear cut "stupid rebel monkey" case. After all Ukraine has much more to gain from this incident if it blamed on rebels/Russians. They also got the US keenly interested in the whole mess, offering a wealth of experience in steering geo-politically important conflicts the "right way", so this could very well be a staged provaction.
One of the videos that is supposed to prove that the airliner was shot down by pro Russian rebels is one day older than the incident according to the meta data:
The truth probably is that a major propaganda war is under way and we simply do not know (maybe never will know) who is directly to blame for the incident.
The Guardian has a data blog of the airliners flying over the region. Top 5 fliers were Aeroflot (86), Singapore (75), Ukraine (62), Lufthansa (56), Malaysia (48). Really could have been anyone. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/jul/18/mh17-he...
Unless the plane crash was due to a software bug, this story, however important it is, has no place here. I appreciate your interest and concern but this isn't the right forum.
The point is this has nothing to do with software or anything of interest to Hacker news. Why bother reading HN if it's going to be cluttered with posts and comments that clearly belong elsewhere (Huffingtonpost.com, Disqus, Twitter whatever...) then some sour grapes crybaby who seeks attention voted down your Karma to prove a point. I'll still read HN but some participants are just trollish. I'll never hire or work with anyone with the usernames above because in my world civility and good behavior counts, even with the "little things" like respecting HN guidelines (see below) but it's your life and do what you want with it. Sooner or later you'll put your foot in your mouth in the very worst way and panic all day over your mistake.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
This is a systems bug based on an underestimation of a technical bug, i.e. that flying 1,000 feet over a 32,000 feet restricted altitude was considered "safe" given the hardware used. Such an assumption ended up being wrong. OTOH, the OP makes the point that diverting flights isn't as simply as moving the joystick in a different direction, given the nature of crowded airspace and routes. It's also interesting to note, as the OP does, that flights at lower altitudes were routinely conducted over Afghanistan and Iraq.
I actually think the OP is overstating his case though...but I posted it here because I know there are flight enthusiasts who care about the details, such as whether 1,000 ft. above a restricted altitude is not much more reckless than speeding 63 mph over 65.
HN will be a sad place if it concerns itself only with bugs in pure logic, and not all the bugs and misunderstandings of details and mechanics that exist outside of software code.
[+] [-] MarkMc|11 years ago|reply
"Malaysian officials said an airline could not be expected to have the intelligence information and other resources to make independent determinations to avoid an area where air traffic controllers were still sending planes. But some carriers had already done just that. China Airlines, the flagship carrier of Taiwan, said that it had avoided flying over all of Ukraine since April 4. Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines also confirmed that they had not flown planes through Ukrainian airspace since March 3."
It also looks like Air France and British Airways avoided Ukraine entirely [2]
And even if all airlines had made the mistake of flying over Ukraine, it is absurd to suggest that an airline might not have the "intelligence information and other resources" to make an independent judgement about safety. A single person spending half an hour on the internet would determine that (a) the rebels were shooting down planes using surface-to-air missiles; and (b) there are some surface-to-air missiles that can reach an altitude of 40,000 feet. That is all the information you need to conclude that the area isn't safe for commercial airplanes.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/downing-of-pl...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/17/world/europe/m...
[+] [-] chmars|11 years ago|reply
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bild-981813-726883.html
[+] [-] jakub_g|11 years ago|reply
While Air France avoided Ukraine, KLM did not. Given that AF-KLM is a one airline holding [1], that's rather surprising discrepancy.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France%E2%80%93KLM
[+] [-] konstruktor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasbesoin|11 years ago|reply
The ceiling of the exclusion zone was 32,000 feet. The plane was flying at 33,000 feet. Pilots like to maintain significant buffers. As a pilot, I would be very uncomfortable with 1000 feet of buffer. If an incident occurs that requires manoeuvring, e.g. a mechanical incident, 1000 feet is very little room.
P.S. I'm not speaking to the accuracy of the numbers cited. They are what I heard the person say.
[+] [-] snitko|11 years ago|reply
I personally believe we, as people, will never know the truth as to who did it - was it Ukrainians or the rebels or the Russians. However, this is the direct result of the existence of states and governments. We are taxed to build weapons and go to war for some private and corporate interests we have nothing in common with. Those weapons were built for our money. If each and every person was asked separately "would you like to give us 10% of your income to build these deadly weapons and support the rebels in Ukraine or would you like to keep this money for your family" nobody would give it away voluntarily. Taxation and states are at the root of this evil and it is at moments like these that I can see it as clear as ever.
[+] [-] ufmace|11 years ago|reply
There are always going to be people who want to form organizations, leadership cabals, and have control over things. Even areas already under the control of a strong Government still have corporations, criminal gangs, and various types of civil organizations, all vying for a little bit of that control pie.
Essentially, there will always be some sort of government. It can be a single one that's powerful enough to be unquestionably dominant over anything it chooses to touch, or it can be dozens of little ones, all vying for control over various things in various places. That essentially looks like Somalia or Syria or Libya - total chaos, with constant risk of offending one warlord or another or some gang of bandits, and none of them will make the slightest pretense of listening to you. Avoiding that requires having one government with enough power to squash anybody like that. The best we can get is to have one dominant government, set up in such a way that it has some degree of obligation to listen to the population.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|11 years ago|reply
Is this really disputed? There are people with agendas trying to spin it one way or the other, but given that the rebels initially claimed responsibility for it, and the fact the Russians probably wouldn't make this mistake (it's easy to check if something is a commercial aircraft), it looks almost certain it was the rebels mistaking the airliner for a military plane.
[+] [-] jackweirdy|11 years ago|reply
I disagree. There's a very promising international investigation being planned, and they have an excellent track record of success.
[+] [-] andrewljohnson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eevilspock|11 years ago|reply
Taxation also does a lot of positive things. Your logic is filled with false conclusions. What do you propose instead of taxation and states?
[+] [-] Svip|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ufmace|11 years ago|reply
We still don't have any idea what happened to that flight 370, either.
I don't think this will help them, though. I sure wouldn't buy any stock in anything connected to them. Even if nothing about either crash was their fault in any reasonable way, people remember stuff like that.
[+] [-] myth_drannon|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkMc|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gizmo686|11 years ago|reply
This sounds like a good reason to buy stock in them.
[+] [-] maaku|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|11 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/downing-of-pl...
I would've posted this link had I seen it earlier...but it is interesting to see how the OP, a pilot himself, thinks MH17 didn't have much cause to change its route. I mean, the OP even acknowledges that the Malaysian Air pilots would've known about the Ukranian cargo plane that was shot down earlier that day...in the NYT news report linked above, the 32,000-ft-restricted altitude left planes exposed to rockets that could strike at twice that height.
[+] [-] _delirium|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidww2|11 years ago|reply
In such an environment it seems naive for an airlines to not include the safety of the flight path in their calculations. If all civilian flights below 32K feet are forbidden by the Ukrainian authorities, that doesn't automatically mean that flying just 1000 feet above would be safe. Also while other airlines are guilty of flying over war zones too, that doesn't mean Malaysian airlines is not.
[+] [-] tommi|11 years ago|reply
There is Eurocontrol which apparently hadn't advised before the incident to avoid the airspace in question.
[+] [-] konstruktor|11 years ago|reply
In aviation, you have to manage risks, you cannot avoid them entirely. For example, there are different levels of redundancy, depending on how critical a system is. There may be two, three or maybe four units, but there surely aren't 25 units of even the most critical equipment - the plane would be too heavy to take off. At some point, you have to decide what the acceptable risk is, and go with that. I think your argument has a strong hindsight bias.
[+] [-] ig1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrockway|11 years ago|reply
I believe the ICAO is this regulatory agency.
[+] [-] chimeracoder|11 years ago|reply
> After each crash, disaster or terrorist episode, it is natural to point fingers and say, Why didn’t we foresee that specific threat? Thus one attempted shoe bombing leads to a decade of shoes-off orders in security lines. The truth is that air transportation, like most other modern systems, could not operate if it fortified itself against every conceivable peril.
Many people like to use phrases like "one $INCIDENT is one too many". In reality, all of life is about balancing and mitigating risks. Just because a single failure happened in one case doesn't mean the entire system is faulty; given enough time, any system that is not 100% foolproof (that is, all of them) is going to have a failure. The question is whether it is actually feasible and/or reasonable to prevent those.
[+] [-] harimau|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philjohn|11 years ago|reply
That could just be the usual British "better safe than sorry" mentality, but I suspect they were perhaps given intelligence that suggested unstable rebels had access to SAMs.
[+] [-] konstruktor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|11 years ago|reply
Couple this with some reports that the plane was escorted by Ukrainian fighter jets at some point and it stops looking as a clear cut "stupid rebel monkey" case. After all Ukraine has much more to gain from this incident if it blamed on rebels/Russians. They also got the US keenly interested in the whole mess, offering a wealth of experience in steering geo-politically important conflicts the "right way", so this could very well be a staged provaction.
[+] [-] chmars|11 years ago|reply
One of the videos that is supposed to prove that the airliner was shot down by pro Russian rebels is one day older than the incident according to the meta data:
https://twitter.com/ofehr_en/status/490039740595707904/photo...
The truth probably is that a major propaganda war is under way and we simply do not know (maybe never will know) who is directly to blame for the incident.
[+] [-] arjie|11 years ago|reply
1: https://gist.github.com/klaufir/d1e694c064322a7fbc15
2: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2b4kpg/conspira...
[+] [-] nacs|11 years ago|reply
http://pax-americana.livejournal.com/660.html
[+] [-] richardwigley|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MisterMashable|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterMashable|11 years ago|reply
Hacker News Guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
[+] [-] josephlord|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|11 years ago|reply
This is a systems bug based on an underestimation of a technical bug, i.e. that flying 1,000 feet over a 32,000 feet restricted altitude was considered "safe" given the hardware used. Such an assumption ended up being wrong. OTOH, the OP makes the point that diverting flights isn't as simply as moving the joystick in a different direction, given the nature of crowded airspace and routes. It's also interesting to note, as the OP does, that flights at lower altitudes were routinely conducted over Afghanistan and Iraq.
I actually think the OP is overstating his case though...but I posted it here because I know there are flight enthusiasts who care about the details, such as whether 1,000 ft. above a restricted altitude is not much more reckless than speeding 63 mph over 65.
HN will be a sad place if it concerns itself only with bugs in pure logic, and not all the bugs and misunderstandings of details and mechanics that exist outside of software code.