A Malaysian plane has been shot down in the Ukraine.

[WeAreEternal]

The flight mh17 from Amsterdam to kuala lumpor with 295 people on board, it was a boing 777.
It was shot down with a buk ground to air missile.
They say there are no survivors.

It's awful.

This whole story is horrendously heart renching.

ILoveMyDogs - is your DH relative safe?

I bought a paper today and tweets are printed supposedly from who did this.

It just all feels unreal. We are supposed to be a civilised world and WW1 was supposed to be the war that ended all wars, 100 years ago.

Oh Tess
There are just no words...

"Did MH17 pilot divert INTO the danger zone? Aviation expert claims captain made last-minute change of course over Ukraine because he 'felt uncomfortable' as it emerges plane was ordered to fly 2,000 feet lower than requested."

I don't think there will be any long term political repercussions from this.

Whoever fired the missile wasn't deliberately aiming for a passenger airline. I doubt if there will ever be any criminal prosecutions relating to this.

As to the flight path; the aviation industry puts money first. If it's cheaper in fuel to fly over a war zone they will do it.

Maybe the world needs a better system of agreeing no fly zones over any conflict zone and enforcing these on all airlines?

It's horrible to think of those poor people suffering, especially the children. With the time of day you would assume most were awake. Quite a few were probably out of their seats. At 33,000 feet the air is too thin to breathe so hypoxia would occur within about a minute.

I don't think the black boxes (cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder) will help much with this investigation. They both probably stopped recording on impact therefore will only reveal height and speed.

To confirm a missile strike and location of impact on plane it will need to be reconstructed. However from the pictures most of the plane has been destroyed by the fireball. Therefore we may never get all the answers.

It's also sad.

Should say Schipol. Thank you, my colleague is devastated. I'm not in the industry any longer, but it's still a part of me. I was there a very long time.

The CVR will record the moment of impact and the sounds of the a/c breaking up.

The FDR will record instruments and systems failing as the a/c breaks apart.

One assumes ACARS suddenly went berserk with messages. I'm a pprune registered member so going to read in tonight.

I think the MH management must have thought someone was playing an appalling joke. No one would expect one company to lose two airframes within five months. I fully expect MAS to disappear in their current format, same as happened to PanAm, Swiss Air and Sabena. I can't imagine people are happy to fly them now.

I think thats the other tragedy that no one seems to have mentioned in the press. (Though obviously not on the same level)

I agree Malaysian Airlines has no way back from this. They were struggling to compete before MH370. Their reputation is beyond repair.

Which means a lot of job are going to be lost - along with all the other knock on effects that has - to people who have already lost friends in one or other disaster.

weatherall my understanding is that the plane would have broken up on impact with the missile not on impact with the ground.
The information coming in seems to suggest that, along with the size of the debris field. I doubt there was a chance for those poor passengers to become hypoxic. Hoepfully it would have been instantaneous for them.

They will spend tens of millions on investigations so there is a good chance for them to understand clearly what happened.

I sincerely hope there will be criminal prosecutions. If history tells us anything (Lockerbie for instance) then prosecution will surely follow once the evidence is in. It's too much of a political hot potato to be swept under the carpet as a mistake. We can't forget that if this was a missile, it was fired with the intention of hitting an aircraft. There was an intention to kill with this act, even if a commercial aircraft was hit instead of a cargo aircraft.
That said, there are of course lessons to be learned here. In the future much more stringent guidelines and rules will be put in place to guarentee safer fly zones.

The phone transcript with the people who apparently did it is pretty shocking isn't it...

They have updated again.

It's now 10 British who have been killed.

They are also saying the missile was definitely fired from inside the Ukraine.

Yes, Malaysia Airlines will have to fold.

Of course there's no point being over-dramatic but if it is proved to be Russian backed then it DOES pose a massive headache for Europe and the rest of the world.

If history tells us anything (Lockerbie for instance) then prosecution will surely follow once the evidence is in. It's too much of a political hot potato to be swept under the carpet as a mistake.

How long did that take, and how did they actually end up getting anyone to accept responsibility.

Much easier to force the hand of a smaller country the size of Libya. Not quite as easy if it is Russian related and they don't want to cooperate fully.

BBC news was reporting this morning that Malaysian Airlines is already in dire straits and it is unlikely to last the year.

what exactly is the relationship between the pro Russian sepoeratists and Putin?
Are they a proxy army, is it funding, does anyone even know for sure?

Could Putin credibly distance himself from their actions, perhaps we should hope so if it allows him face saving options

If Putin does that, he has to distance himself from the legitimacy of a separatist Eastern Ukraine, which would be counter to everything he has said previously.

It could potentially be seen as a sign of weakness to do this.

Its also not inline with his ambitions regarding a Russian sphere of influence.

It could be a potential face saving option, but I think it unlikely that he will go that far.

There was talk that Russia could veto the UN security council meeting that the UK has called, but I think that unlikely as that would be seen as obstructive. The mentality being they have "done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide". However I think they could be more obstructive on the ground instead and pay lip service to calls to do X, Y or Z.

I think if its a cock up (which is the most likely option) there will be traceable evidence which will be difficult to cover up. But not necessarily enough evidence to get an admission of guilt or prove who is responsible beyond doubt.

If Russia are responsible, their best option would be to be seen to cooperate to a point, but generally be difficult and obstructive at the same time.

The thing about Lockerbie is that the evidence was largely circumstantial and open to interpretation and there did seem to be significant political pressure applied to determine who the evidence pointed at. I moan about conspiracy theories but the way Lockerbie was "resolved" was extraordinarily murky.

I'm hoping the evidence in this case with be less open to such pressures.

"This certainly will be a wakeup call for Europe and the world that there are consequences to an escalating conflict in eastern Ukraine. It is not going to be localised, it is not going to be contained." - Obama in press conference a minute ago.

Note the fact that he phrases it in a way, putting this as primarily a European problem rather than a world one...

Ukraine is a European issue.

However Putin is a world one.

Hilary Clinton was fairly direct telling Europe it was our problem as well. Heard her on the radio and can't remember phrasing but it was unambigous

BBC news has released details of a supposed recording of phone convos between Ukrainian separatists and seemingly Russian officers that seem to point the finger at separatists shooting the plane down - here

N

Now confirmed 10 Britons onboard.

Now confirmed 10 Britons onboard.

A friend who lives in Amsterdam has just posted on FB that her colleague was aboard the flight with his wife and 2 children :(

So terribly sad.

We also found out today that DHs best friends niece body was found after she went missing last week.

This has been an awful year for deaths for my close friends and family.

RIP all those lost on flight MH17 and I hope those responsible pay the price without further conflict for the rest of the world.