I was wondering TimC - have there been any industry wide repercussions of this yet? Maybe repercussions is the wrong word, but are there general things like keep an eye out for aliens/missiles/other planes or making sure there are transponder systems that can't be turned off by the pilot, or being more prudent around that area etc etc - I don't really know what these might be so I'm just speculating, and I guess some of the potential action points won't be actionable until what happened to MH370 is known. Anyway, I'm just curious to know what effect it has had on the wider industry at this stage?
I started thinking about this when someone asked me if I was nervous about flying to France on Sunday - I'm not, certainly not more so than before MH370, but clearly some people think I should be.
No, nothing as yet, Pippa. Until something is known, you've no idea which stable door the horse bolted from. The passport thing may have had some repercussions for border agencies, but that's about it. But it's the major topic of conversation among aircrews the world over.
Who would have fired this missile? From where? Who (other than governments) in the area has large ground-to-air missiles with the range and speed to take out a target at 35,000ft?
I'm thinking fired from warship. As has happened before.
What political reasons would there be for such a strike?
Incompetence. Not admitted to due to reluctance to admit to said incompetence.
I can only think of two high-level airliners lost to missile fire* - the Iran Air flight shot down by the USS Vincennes in 1988, and the Siberian Air flight shot down by the Ukrainian military in 2001. One was a misidentification at a time of a de-facto shooting war, the other an accident well outside the range capabilities of the missile (but probably caused by a collision with parts of the missile in its descent after running out of fuel). A degree of incompetence was implicit in both cases, but neither event went unnoticed! In fact, the Siberian shoot-down was detected by the CIA pretty much instantly, and the Iran Air shoot-down was a deliberate act and seen by many agencies in the area.
*On checking my facts, the Iran Air flight was only at 14,000ft - very low for a jet airliner. So the
only high-level ground-to-air missile shoot-down of an airliner is the Siberian Air one. There have been several shot down by fighters, but these have all been deliberate acts where the facts were more or less easily established.