777 jumbo jet flying straight and level at 33,000 feet over Ukraine no match for SA-17 missile
THE MIL & AERO BLOG, 17 July 2014. It looks like Malaysia Airlines is having another really bad day. Breaking news reports that a Malaysia 777 jumbo jet en-route from Amsterdam is missing and may have been shot down over Ukraine where government forces and Russian-backed separatists are locked in a civil war in the eastern region of the country.
News reports say the Malaysian jumbo jet was flying at 33,000 feet when airline officials lost contact with it. News reports say the plane with 295 people aboard may have been shot down by a Russian-designed SA-17 surface-to-air missile fired from a Buk missile launcher.
If this is the case then there's no hope of any survivors; it's likely that everyone aboard was dead before the first pieces of wreckage hit the ground.
If the Malaysia flight was at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, it would have been well within the range of an SA-17 missile, which flies at three times the speed of sound. That weapon is designed to hit targets as high as 82,000 feet and as far away as 29 miles. It's designed to hit maneuverable targets like jet fighters and incoming missiles, so a lumbering passenger jet flying straight and level at 33,000 feet would have been no match for the SA-17.
Related: Vanished Malaysia 370: anybody know what happened to that plane?
It would be like hitting the jumbo jet with several machine guns at once. The plane was pressurized at 33,000 feet, most likely would have sustained violent decompression in many places, and disintegrated in mid-air. Picture a balloon popping; that's essentially what would have happened.
This disaster, if confirmed, would come just four months after another aviation disaster involving a Malaysia 777 jumbo jet, made by the Boeing Co.
Malaysia 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia early in the morning of 8 March 2014 en-route to Beijing. That plane with 227 passengers and 12 crew members simply disappeared. Some are still searching for its wreckage in remote areas of the Indian Ocean.
There's no word on who might have shot that Malaysia flight down today, or why. At this stage it's not confirmed what actually happened. Still, it sounds like another piece of devastatingly bad news for a beleaguered airline.
John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
