How Hard Is Shooting Down A Jetliner?

Elena Holodny talked to sources on the ground that confirm seeing a Buk missile system near the site of the crash. Alexis Madrigal explains that “it may sound implausible that a group of rebel fighters could take out a 777, but, given the right anti-aircraft weaponry, it is not”:

The Buk system was developed by the old Soviet Union. Its missile batteries are portable. The missiles themselves are radar guided. If one is in the area, and there are people who can operate it, it has the technical capability to shoot missiles far beyond 33,000 feet.

A passenger jet, in particular, would make an easy target, relative to a fighter jet or a rocket. They are big and they move in very predictable straight lines across the sky. Passenger planes emit a transponder signal, too, which could be used for tracking.

Linda Kinstler suspects that whoever “shot down the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Donetsk on Thursday, killing all 295 people aboard, probably didn’t know what they were shooting at”:

It appears that the plane was taken down by a Soviet-era Buk missile system, which separatists claimed to have gotten their hands on when they gained control of a Ukrainian air defense base on June 29. The Buk is a Soviet-era air defense system used by both Ukrainian and Russian defense forces.

“When you’re sitting behind a radar screen of one of these things, there’s no way to tell what it is. With the Buk, there’s no way to distinguish between friendly and foe. You’re just going to take a shot at it,” says Raymond Finch, a Eurasian military analyst at the Foreign Military Studies Office. “If [the separatists] had reports that the Ukrainians were flying over their airspace, they would shoot. It begs the question of who is sitting behind the trigger. Are they highly trained? My guess is no they are not.”

It’s highly possible that the civilian airliner was mistaken for a Ukrainian Il-76 military transport plane, the same model that separatists in Luhansk shot down on June 14, killing all 49 people on board, mostly Ukrainian servicemen.