Malaysia Airlines MH370

I know there were conflicting reports earlier about how the rebels would have got their hands on weapons capable of downing the plane, but assuming it was a "Russian-built, vehicle-mounted Buk missile system" (as per the Guardian), do we know where that would likely have come from?

thx eazy!

god that stuff drives me nuts

They got two from a Ukrainian air base. Both Ukraine and the separatists have claimed the two they took were not operational, but this seems highly unlikely now.

The Buk system has four or five separate parts, iirc, including two radars. It seems likely that they only got some of the parts, allowing them to launch missiles but not giving them a clear picture of what they were firing at.

serious question: does anybody believe the tweets and phone intercepts are fake? my friend who is seo guy was going on and on about how internet marketers create fake people all the time. i think occam's razor applies, he says it happens in SEO all the time so it's plausible it could be faked

It seems likely that they only got some of the parts, allowing them to launch missiles but not giving them a clear picture of what they were firing at.

Great combination.

xp they do read a little bit like they were written by a russian-speaking reddit user tbh

The Strelkov VK update was probably real, the phone intercepts are as questionable / reliable as any phone intercepts from dubious ex-KGB states.

This article says that if you're just relying on radar you can't actually tell the difference between a cargo transport and a commercial plane:

Latiff said that if they had only one radar, as Ukrainian officials suggest, it would have been pointed at the target. A second, rotating one would normally have been part of a battery to pick up other planes in the immediate vicinity, but he said even that would not have established whether it was a commercial plane and there would normally have been communications equipment to pick up signals showing the plane was non-military.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/separatist-links-malaysia-airlines-mh17-removed

The United States government has concluded that the passenger jet felled over Ukraine was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile launched from rebel-held territory and most likely provided by Russia to pro-Moscow separatists, officials said on Friday.

While American officials are still investigating the chain of events leading to the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on Thursday, they pointed to a series of indicators of Russian involvement. Among other things, military and intelligence officials said there was mounting evidence that a Ukrainian military plane shot down just three days earlier had been fired upon from inside Russian territory by the same sort of missile battery used to bring down the civilian jet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/malaysia-airlines-plane-ukraine.html

So if this is correct, then it wasn't the BUK system that they took from the Ukrainian military.

Doesn't seem to be any solid evidence there. The allegation about Russia firing missiles into Ukraine related to a different missile system (GRAD rather than Buk). You couldn't hit anything in Ukraine from Russia with the latter and there has been no suggestion so far that the separatists have the former.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/07/nato-general-warned-of-russian-anti-aircraft-training-for-separatists/

USAF and NATO said back on June 30 they had intelligence indicating Russia had been training the separatists to use "vehicle-born" surface to air missiles.

Still waiting for someone to blame Israel for all this

israel more interested in killing children on the ground than adults in the air

i'm pretty cynical but given the fact that there were children on board that post is pretty gross

you're right, maybe israel was involved then. branching out and killing children wherever they may find them - on the beaches, in the air.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/world/europe/malaysia-airlines-plane-ukraine.html

<-- rebels and kyiv jockeying to handle bodies, recovery of debris, etc.

also more details about what military tech the rebels may have had, when, and where

xpost

i'm not exactly zionist no. 1 but that's still pretty gross, but whatever, it's ilx.

ugh please don't bring Israel/Palestine into this.

i agree

(btw i think i have spent the past year or two thinking "balls" was "cutty." does "cutty" post on ilx anymore? he was the lawyer, right?)

balls is not cutty.

cutty posts as underrated aerosmith etc now iirc

i thought that was t0m h4milt0n, so confused

anyway, let's not dwell on this here. sorry.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118770/who-igor-bezler-russian-rebel-implicated-malaysia-flight-17

started new thread for discussion of current events: Malaysian flight MH17 / Ukraine conflict 2014

PBS' Nova covers the disappearance.Good summary of everything.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/why-planes-vanish.html

Search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Hampered by Disagreements

The five teams of investigators were made up of officials from Boeing, Inmarsat, France’s Thales Group , the U.S.’s National Transportation Safety Board, and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation. Each was asked by the ATSB to analyze the data independently and draw their own conclusions.

“Originally we thought we had a consensus among the five groups, based on the best data available at the time,” Mr. Dolan, head of the Australian air-accident investigator, said in an interview. “Once we refined the data again the methodologies diverged.”

Investigators haven’t made clear why using an autopilot would result in such a different flight path from that suggested by the plane’s satellite signals. Mr. Dolan declined to say which of the experts supported which of the crash-site theories. Representatives from the NTSB, Inmarsat, and Thales said they couldn’t immediately comment, and a Boeing spokesman declined to comment[

Because 2014 is the worst: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-2888817/Flight-Indonesia-Singapore-loses-contact--media.html

Ugh. So sorry

exact same make/model i just took to heathrow. yikes.

Agence France-Presse ✔ @AFP
Follow

#BREAKING AirAsia Flight #QZ8501 likely 'at bottom of sea': Indonesia search chief
2:26 AM - 29 Dec 2014

sigh: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/44cf5b6b38ba4c1d8c7cbcf0c9a3f152/indonesia-bodies-found-near-site-where-plane-disappeared

Well, someone's gone off the deep end.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/jeff-wise-mh370-theory.html

I have some clients at Baikonur - i'll ask around.

I have no idea how something this crazy actually ends up being published.

richard belzer's new book will answer all our questions...

http://www.amazon.com/Someone-Is-Hiding-Something-Happened/dp/1632207281/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/ice-t-confused.gif?w=650

seems legit

in re: nymag's jeff wise article. the biggest weakness in his theory is the total lack of a coherent motive for such an elaborate plot. even the most off-the-wall speculative motives seem far too weak to justify the theorized actions. one simply asks why on earth would anyone conceivably do this?

as long as you disregard this glaring hole, his theory hangs together fairly well.

It's still pretty impossible for someone to do this undetected while crossing over land borders too, even by flying close to territorial boundaries, as Wise suggest.

somewhat related: I've found that it's not a good idea these days to tell cab drivers in Malaysia I'm a reporter. Every single one of them is a Jeff Wise.

xp wise did a q&a on gawker and was asked about motive a couple of times - his response was basically ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

that is my motivation for most things so im a believer baby

Tbf, I think he was less :shrug: and more admitting that lack of motive is a major missing component of his theory.

seems kinda nuts to dream up an outlandish and insanely detailed theory without also coming up with an answer to the very first question any rational person will ask - 'why'?

Well, once you move well beyond the realm of Occam's Razor, I imagine "why" becomes less important.

also, when there's no clear indication of who or why, it perhaps makes (or seems to make) more sense to deal with the evidence you do have than to speculate about motives.

when you hypothesize a state-funded and state-planned crime on this scale, yet you cannot supply the first idea of what possible benefit they could derive from it, as opposed to the massive risks involved, then you have a deeply, deeply flawed hypothesis. because equipment malfunction followed by a crash does not require a crime, a criminal, or motives, it becomes the most reasonable default explanation.

otm

love the bit about the Kazakh Cosmodrome and the big pile of dirt just exactly right for covering a plane that size with