Jesus, I wonder if this means they were stuck in that constant ascent-descent “Phugoid Cycle” you can see in the video the entire way across the sea. Props to the pilots who did what they could to at least keep the craft in the air long enough to make it there and save the people they could.
If it got clapped by a sam what happened for it to get so little damage they were nominally able to try and land at grozny and then fly back fully intact? I'd be livid if my SAM "shot down" a plane and it was able to fly around fully intact without a visible scratch for hours, I forgot if it was a TOR M1 or something that downed the Prigozhin partybus but when that one was hit, it went into a flatspin.
Also this.
I’m a plane autist, but I’m staying out of this dumpster fire of a thread, with the exception of this: one should have nothing but admiration for those gentlemen flying that airplane. They’re in the same league of Haynes and Takahama, with passengers walking away alive from that hour of hell.
May they have ample reward in the next life.
To tl;dr what happened from Aviaustists:
As explained to me, the Russian missile broke the landing gear, including the manual controls, and damaged several control surfaces as well as depressurizing the cabin. So the plane could maintain altitude & heading but was hard to control during things like landing and when it did land it had no gear. This would make the engines the new landing gear. They had also been forced to divert to an airport that is...lets say less equipped to deal with a broken commercial jet trying to make an emergency landing than the one they were heading to.
Damn this thread is a mess. Do we have proof of any of the two sides being blamed? Do we have proof of this being drone damage? Proof it was Russian AA?
I am genuinely asking anyone that may know. Sure it looks like a blast pattern... but is it? What if a chunk of dirt full of rocks got flung and broke apart before hitting the body? That seems way more likely than anything else I have heard.
This has been answered but I want to again point to
@RodgerDodger 's excellent post covering these issues
@Standardized Profile
Truly subhuman incompetence if true. The Pantsir is a short ranged system, and likely could've identified the airliner visually or with its thermal imager.
Very likely it was operating in automatic mode with a lot of the "don't shoot down civies" safeties turned off or degraded because the Pantsir like most Russian AAD has issues IDing engaging Ukrainian 'deep strike' drones.
Historically airline shootdowns are usually a perfect storm of incompetence and a high-stress environment.
Although in the case of KAL-007 the Su-15 pilot correctly identified the plane and was ordered to shoot it down anyways.
Small point of order: The weather prevented positive ID of the plane. The Russian pilot ID'd the aircraft type, and reported many factors that said this was a Civilian airliner, including his own assessment it was an airliner. But was unable to get things like the tail number or to be able to safely fly in a manner that the crew would have been able to observe him, or even see into the plane.
(zero attempt to communicate on radio were done. Russia high command also failed to piece together that if the weather was too shit to ID a plane, it was probably too shit for a spy plane to get pictures)
The plane itself could be running a fake transponder. That happened a lot in the Iran Iraq War during the 80's. Commercial flights continued over the Middle East with the war going on around them. This resulted in 2 incidents. The Iraqi's were operating a French Dassault Business Jet converted into a strike bomber. It was flying on a civilian commercial air corridor, and launched 2 Exocet Anti Ship Missiles into the side of the USS Stark. Killing a large number of crew and nearly sinking the ship. A few months later the USS Vincennes was looking at a similar situation of a questionable transponder approaching from Iran, while they were fighting off 3 Iranian Gunboats. The Vincennes launched missiles and shot down an Iranian Air Liner.
Additionally the Vincennes attempted to raise the aircraft on international common frequencies before launching missiles. Those communication attempts were ignored.
Versus KAL 0007 were no attempts at radio contact were made.
Okay so I have another question with regards to "did Russia do it?" and stuff like that. These planes have transponders or something like that, right? Can they be spoofed or manipulated?
I don't trust anyone on any side (sides in a plane crash... fuck me) so I am looking at some of the more conspiracy stuff now because it is fun. Can people be tricked into shooting the wrong target?
Based upon what you guys are telling me, a external strike is a definite possibility or even the likely cause. And if it is at such a close range as
@RodgerDodger laid out in his very good post, is ignorance or incompetence an excuse? It seems very preventable.
How many rogue missile systems are floating around out there? I've got this suspicion that the militaries of the world are not keeping track of stuff as closely as they make us think they are. At least not anymore.
There is no question, Russia did it.
You seem to be coming from a place of well-meaning ignorance so I'll try to educate you.
The transponders ID COULD technically be cloned/manipulated, but they are broadcasting all the time with listening stations/radars all over the world. You can track them yourself in real time on sites and apps; remember the guy who made the site that tracked where Elon Musk's private jet was at any time? Elon musk was not allowed to turn off, clone, or spoof his transponder - no commercial aircraft is allowed to.
There's no "GPS log" you could manipulate on the transponder, and unless its like over the south pole or some shit, there are going to be multiple sources tracking the transponder. So you can't try to do stuff like fuck with signal strength to try to appear closer/farther. Most of the trackers are airport RADARS so they know not just location but heading and airspeed.
So if you had a cloned transponder, and turned it on, that plane's ID would suddenly jump miles on the tracking data and be very noticeable. The only way you could bait and switch would be you'd get the the "real" Transponder and the "fake" Transponder plane to fly very close together (or be at the same airport) and make the swap. You would also need to use the same model of airplane and the same tail number (or only land at tiny airports with no local ATC) because these things will be checked by spotters and logged.
Swapping these things is a Big, BIG Naughty. That means no reputable mechanic will do it because they & their employer will be utterly, globally, fucked for life.
As for being tricked:
- No Ukrainian drones were coming from the caspian sea direction.
- no drones are the size of a commerical airliner.
- No ukrainian "deep strike" drones can fly as high as an airliner or as face.
I see that a Pantsir is being claimed as the source of the missile.
The Pantsir is a "point defense" mobile air defense system. This is something you place near a mobile high-value target, like an HQ or strategic air defense, to protect it against short-range low-flying threats - intended to be cruisemissiles but now it is drones. Because these threats might be moving multiples of the speed of sound and detected at less than 10 miles, Pantsir offers an "automatic" mode - you flip it on and it just shoots down anything it detects. In cases like this "civilian airport defense" it should be programed with sectors of fire and other exclusion criteria based on airspeed or contact size.
edit: Automatic mode is also what you set when you are concerned Private Mohammedski will be drunk, asleep, or engaged in totally hetreo blowjobs with another soldier.
In fact the Pantsir has a rather robust exclusion criteria, the problem with drones is it TOO robust and it will often ignore Ukrainian drones so the Russias have fucked with the settings.
There is no conspiracy, there is no deeper meaning.
Russia turned off the safeguards of their AAD, someone was incompetent and didn't do it right, and it needlessly shot its load into a civilian airliner. Russia then tried to murder the survivors by denying them permission to land in Russia hoping the plane would ditch in the Caspian and sink along with evidence of what they did.
Their expectations were subverted when they were able to reach another country, and now Russia are trying to cope and flood disinformation to avoid consequences of killing dozens of civilians from a country uninvolved in their war.
Can an external actor spoof the transponder of a foreign plane in flight? Not really. I mean an advanced Electronic Warfare Aircraft might be able to? But it would need be in airspace they control.
[ ... ]
So yes transponder games are possible. But don't seem to have been the case here. The Azerbaijan Airlines plane was displaying the correct transponder. And once hit the pilots switched the transponder to the International Distress Code.
It is much more likely Russian Air Defense Conscripts were poorly trained and panic fired on what they misidentified as a drone.
A tell tale sign of "Russian Fuck Up" is Roskosmos, the Russian Space Agency, was putting out the news that "the plane hit a large flock of birds" before the plane actually crashed. While it was still airborne and heading for Kazahkstan. They thought the plane would crash in the Caspian Sea and cover up their oh so Russian Fuck Up.
Pretty much this.
