What I don’t understand is why the Malaysia Airlines plane was flying right over the war zone and precisely in the area where terrorists have been shooting down one plane after another yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Is the world even aware of what is going on in the region?
The terrorists, of course, weren’t planning to shoot down a passenger airplane. They were sure it was yet another military airplane of the Ukrainian Army, like the ones they have been shooting down for weeks. They bragged about it minutes after shooting it down (“This will show those Ukrainians how to fly in our space! We warned them we’d shoot them down”). And when they realized the mistake, they tried to destroy the evidence. They shouldn’t have even bothered, though, because people only believe what they want to. No amount of proof will persuade those who need to believe the missile launch was ordered by either Poroshenko or Putin.
Clarissa's Blog 
Putin might not have ordered it, but what a rookie mistake, giving sophisticated arms to groups that you can’t completely control.
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I’ve seen a couple of references to the flight being diverted due to a storm.
It was probably a mistake, but part of me is ready to think Putin wanted them to do something like that to guage European reactions (muted and cowardly so far).
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http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/cost-likely-to-have-driven-malaysia-airlines-decision-to-fly-over-ukraine/story-e6frg95x-1226993554609?from=public_rss&utm_source=The%20Australian&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&net_sub_uid=89465184#
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Do you have access to a non-paywalled version of that article? The title seems to agree with my previously-posted hypothesis
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I don’t have it.
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It seems the airspace over the crach was closed to a certain height and the MH flight was just above that elevation: http://www.eurocontrol.int/news/mh-17-ukraine
Also, you can see here that now all planes are avoiding Ukraine:
http://www.flightradar24.com/47.83,27.76/3
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I was on my way from Prague to Seoul yesterday – a journey which could have taken us over Ukraine at around the time of the incident if I’d chosen a different route. However, as I was looking at the in flight route update map thing, I was surprised to see that we were flying straight over Iraq. So… I don’t know much about this, but it seems to me that it takes a lot to divert flights from a certain airspace.
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I can think of three scenarios involving missile fired by the Russians:
a) Putin and his oligarch friends are tired of sanctions. However, they have whipped the nationalist and revanchist sentiments so high, they cannot abruptly stop supporting the separatists. In some circles separatist leaders are more popular than Putin, and Putin is popular only to the extent he supports the separatists. Thus, they desperately needed separatists to commit some major atrocity, which would justify withdrawing support.
b) Russian heavy weapons are somehow getting into separatist hands… Obviously, these are not the local Russian peasants who just found a tank in their barn and decided to offer it to their comrades across the border. Local military commanders are obviously involved. Can one exclude that some local commander with access to surface-to-air missiles decided to help the separatists by firing a missile at what they believed was an Ukrainian military plane? By the way, Ukrainian sources accused Russia of shooting at Ukrainian plane couple of days ago.
c) shoot it down, pin it on Ukrainians.
All of the above scenarios may actually involve missile fired from Ukrainian territory, since there are large stretches of border not controlled by Ukraine.
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“By the way, Ukrainian sources accused Russia of shooting at Ukrainian plane couple of days ago.”
– I want everybody to observe that I didn’t write about it because I dislike Ukrainian propaganda as much as I dislike the Russian propaganda.
These scenarios, though, remind me of the joke about the likelihood of meeting a dinosaur every time you go outside being 50% because you either meet one or not. 🙂 Is this a scientist thing where all hypotheses have equal validity irrespective of anything? Because you just SO reminded me of my husband with this comment. He drives me to distraction with these lists of scenarios that, to him, seem to be of equal value. 🙂
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The hypotheses don’t have equal validity, but to a certain kind of mind, one really has to list them all, as improbable as they might be. I normally try to behave when in public but I totally get this.
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I and many others are deeply skeptical of Putin, for reasons starting with his KGB past.
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It is not unusual for Malaysian planes to use this fly-path. They have been using it for umpteen years until this incidence. The fly-path flying over this area and at a height of 10km IS approved by the Aviation authority, categorically stated by the Malaysian authority, despite a mild warning about the danger but is not a resolute ban…This fly-path is also used by many airlines plying to and from Europe to Asia (almost 15 different airlines using it if I recall correctly)…Just 24 min before this ill fated flight, a Singapore Airlines plane was recorded of passing through it…..I can only say this time Malaysia plane flied at the wrong time at the wrong place…..
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Yes. It is a mystery that a Malaysian dispatcher would route one of their planes through an area that saw two other planes shot down in the previous three days. Another mystery is that the great circle route i.e. the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, from Amsterdam to the plane’s destination, Kuala Lumpur, goes through Kharkiv which is 232 km. north of Donetsk. Why would a dispatcher divert one of his planes so off course from the regular flight plan especially when Malaysian airlines lost 1.3 billion dollars last year and there would be a strong focus on minimizing fuel expenditures thus reducing operational costs. Putin said that there were adverse weather conditions on the regular flight path but this has not been confirmed by other sources which should have acknowledged his information by now. In the south, there is a saying about inexplicable explanations, “this dog don’t hunt.”
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The air is completely safe over Kharkiv. It’s completely safe anywhere except over this really tiny strip of land controlled by the terrorists who’d been shooting down planes and helicopters right before, in that very area.
There was absolutely no logical reason to fly over the war zone. My only explanation right now is that many people are completely unaware that this is a war zone.
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