A rebuttal to this argument is found on the last paragraph of this [1] article:
"Malaysian officials said an airline could not be expected to have the intelligence information and other resources to make independent determinations to avoid an area where air traffic controllers were still sending planes. But some carriers had already done just that. China Airlines, the flagship carrier of Taiwan, said that it had avoided flying over all of Ukraine since April 4. Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines also confirmed that they had not flown planes through Ukrainian airspace since March 3."
It also looks like Air France and British Airways avoided Ukraine entirely [2]
And even if all airlines had made the mistake of flying over Ukraine, it is absurd to suggest that an airline might not have the "intelligence information and other resources" to make an independent judgement about safety. A single person spending half an hour on the internet would determine that (a) the rebels were shooting down planes using surface-to-air missiles; and (b) there are some surface-to-air missiles that can reach an altitude of 40,000 feet. That is all the information you need to conclude that the area isn't safe for commercial airplanes.
The people gathering that kind of intelligence are a secretive bunch. As a civilian, you don't "have" that kind of information, you are only provided with it when somebody thinks that's a good idea. If the British, Chinese and Korean services, for example, knew about a big risk for commercial aviation (plausible), why didn't they share it with the entire commercial aviation community? Sounds a bit like they gave that information to their national carriers, together with an NDA. If that is the case, the British services will have to answer some very tough questions (9 British are dead).
When you say that national intelligence communities are secretive, you're absolutely right. So much so that they would certainly not share any sort of information with commercial/multinational airlines. It sounds ridiculous, given that lives are at stake, but it is important to consider their calculus (taking the US intel perspective for a moment):
Knowledge that rebels had active radar-guided SAMs would be derived from a handful of classified assets, from satellite to radar to drone to people. Adversaries to the US are meant to be unaware of these modalities (to prevent countermeasures), but you can bet they are all in use.
The challenge is that disclosure of any facts gleaned from classified systems potentially reveals their capabilities.
Now disclosure is a continuous spectrum, from "there is a threat" to "here is a multispectral image of a launcher", so perhaps there is some shareable information. In considering that, you weigh the utility (external risk) of the information shared against its credibility (details), and the potential loss of capability incurred by disclosure. When we say "loss of capability", in this case it may mean disclosing the capability to detect missile launches early, which represents a critical piece of US missile defense.
For a historical case study in this type of calculus, it's worth looking into the disclosure of images during the Cuban Missile crisis. There, the US had to provide credible information that there was a threat in Cuba, and did so at the cost of the revelation of U-2 images.
By the way, this same calculus played into the US President's wording when he spoke yesterday about the tragedy. Obama was careful to say little about how they knew where the missile came from.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of an intelligence agency, NDAs are insufficient to protect classified assets, especially where multinationals are involved. Anything that is disclosed would go through several levels of indirection, and would probably end up in a NOTAM (like the one prohibiting flight under FL320 in the region).
I didn't catch the entire interview, but I caught this... "expert comment", I guess I should call it, on PBS's "News Hour" yesterday. Heavily paraphrased:
The ceiling of the exclusion zone was 32,000 feet. The plane was flying at 33,000 feet. Pilots like to maintain significant buffers. As a pilot, I would be very uncomfortable with 1000 feet of buffer. If an incident occurs that requires manoeuvring, e.g. a mechanical incident, 1000 feet is very little room.
P.S. I'm not speaking to the accuracy of the numbers cited. They are what I heard the person say.
As a Russian, I'd like to say I'm deeply sorry for the losses of passengers' families. Whoever did this is a complete monster. Many russians do not support any war or aggression against Ukraine and many are convinced, that Russian government is in some way responsible for this tragedy.
I personally believe we, as people, will never know the truth as to who did it - was it Ukrainians or the rebels or the Russians. However, this is the direct result of the existence of states and governments. We are taxed to build weapons and go to war for some private and corporate interests we have nothing in common with. Those weapons were built for our money. If each and every person was asked separately "would you like to give us 10% of your income to build these deadly weapons and support the rebels in Ukraine or would you like to keep this money for your family" nobody would give it away voluntarily. Taxation and states are at the root of this evil and it is at moments like these that I can see it as clear as ever.
I'm going to take issue with that taxation and states being the root of evil. They are an inevitable result of the way that we humans are. If anything is evil, it's human nature itself.
There are always going to be people who want to form organizations, leadership cabals, and have control over things. Even areas already under the control of a strong Government still have corporations, criminal gangs, and various types of civil organizations, all vying for a little bit of that control pie.
Essentially, there will always be some sort of government. It can be a single one that's powerful enough to be unquestionably dominant over anything it chooses to touch, or it can be dozens of little ones, all vying for control over various things in various places. That essentially looks like Somalia or Syria or Libya - total chaos, with constant risk of offending one warlord or another or some gang of bandits, and none of them will make the slightest pretense of listening to you. Avoiding that requires having one government with enough power to squash anybody like that. The best we can get is to have one dominant government, set up in such a way that it has some degree of obligation to listen to the population.
Sometime in the future there will be just one government for whole earth, and all the people will have equal vote in it. But until that having just one powerful government is very bad. It might have to listen to its own population, but it will completely disregard people of other countries who do not have a vote.
I hope and believe that there will never be a government for the whole planet until such time as there is some entity off of the planet that we need to negotiate with as a united planet.
One powerful government per country might not be perfect, but so far, it seems to be better than anything anyone else has some up with. The alternative is not some imaginary perfect government, but a lot of little competing governments/militias that probably pay even less attention to what anybody not a member of them wants.
I think one government, or rather something like eu, but for whole planet, will be useful, and it will be possible when live standards for people in different countries becomes the same, and old feuds are forgotten. However that's not something to happen in near future and i do hope that mars will be colonized and become off of the planet entity long before that:)
The problem with one powerful government per country is that different countries still have different powers and they like to meddle with weak ones, like US and Russia did in this case.
> The best we can get is to have one dominant government
You think that would resolve everything hey ? Don't you think one dominant government would actually have no incentive to listen to the population and could impose its right by might alone ?
Not really. Look at China, they have a hugely powerful government, yet even they find it easier to engage in popularism than domination. It's much easier to govern a country which supports you: logically any sustainable government should be interested in maintaining enough popularity that their position will not be undermined: but no more than that.
European history is an excellent case study in the fall of dominant rulers who failed to satisfy their subjects.
Wow, if you're looking at the Chinese government as a model for governance...
Uniting all world governments into a single state scares the hell out of me, and I think it could very well be the worst idea, but suggesting China as a pattern is the icing on the cake, quite frankly.
I'm not sure what you think you're saying here. You might have noticed that in something like 90% of the countries on the planet, that country's government is dominant over the entire country? Dominant only means that nobody is capable of challenging them currently for the title of being in control of the country, not that they have total control over everything that happens there.
Yeah, but you always have the possibility to flee your country (legally or illegally) and go in a "better place" (how much better that is depends on where you come from) - but once you have a single government controlling every place on Earth, that possibility is removed.
It honestly depends on how it's set up. If it's American-style, where "the population" amounts to a jabbering know-it-all teenager with no real control over anything, then it won't work, no.
>I personally believe we, as people, will never know the truth as to who did it - was it Ukrainians or the rebels or the Russians.
Is this really disputed? There are people with agendas trying to spin it one way or the other, but given that the rebels initially claimed responsibility for it, and the fact the Russians probably wouldn't make this mistake (it's easy to check if something is a commercial aircraft), it looks almost certain it was the rebels mistaking the airliner for a military plane.
People thought TWA 800 was hit by a missile but after months of investigative work it was determined not to be the case. So let's keep an open mind. The Ukrainians are not infallible.
>After 9 Days, Ukraine Says Its Missile Hit A Russian Jet
Earlier today, Ukraine's military had taken responsibility after nine days of increasingly vaporous denials.
Seventy-eight people, most of them Russian émigrés to Israel, died when the Siberian Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk exploded and plunged 35,000 feet into the sea off the Russian coast. Four minutes earlier, a Ukrainian air defense exercise fired two long-range antiaircraft missiles at a drone off the Black Sea's Crimean coast.
Russian investigators concluded on Friday that one of the missiles, an S-300, struck the drone, but that the second, an S-200, flew 150 more miles and unleashed a warhead of shrapnel balls at the airliner. /
My mind isn't closed on this one, but the case appears pretty clear-cut to me. While it could have exploded mid air, I seriously doubt it crashing in the war zone was a coincidence.
Surface-to-air missile encountering a large body moving at 900km/h which is fully loaded with fuel will cause the body to completely disintegrate mid air at 10000ft. In this case a ball of fire was clearly seen at the time of the impact and bodies were lying intact on the ground.
I'm more and more convinced that it'ss an air-to-air missile, exactly like that Spanish air traffic controller in Kiev was telling that 2 Ukrainian military war planes were tailing that Boeing
> Surface-to-air missile encountering a large body moving at 900km/h which is fully loaded with fuel will cause the body to completely disintegrate mid air at 10000ft.
There are plenty of pilots who ejected after being hit by SAMs in the Gulf War, and they were flying planes much smaller than an airliner. I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the state of the wreckage just yet.
You said it was most certainly rebels mistaking one plane for another. Why are you certain? Do you know how various anti-aircraft weapons work or have you just assumed there's a blinking "target acquired" message and a red Launch button? Unless you are an expert in this field, you have no reason to dispense "certain" opinions. That's the point.
Well the 'rebels' posted boasting about shooting down a plane at the time MH17 was shot down and even posted a video though they seem to have thought it was a military plane. That seems like fairly clear evidence to me. A more interesting and uncertain question is whether they are actually rebels. The main guy organising it is a colonel from Moscow (Igor Strelkov) who officially retired last year but quite likely is reporting to Moscow still rather than rebelling. Here's an article in the Daily Mail - sorry about the quality of the paper. Still facts are facts.
I did say that, and I stand by that. I would imagine the Ukrainians and Russians would be smart enough to use the usual channels to check what the plane was before trying to shoot it down. The Ukrainians, in particular, would be aware that commercial flight paths covered the area, given that the Ukrainian government coördinates the country's airspace.
Are you an expert? In another comment you made the extraordinary claim, substantiated by absolutely no one and no organization of any authority at all (just the standard conspiracy noise and rhetoric that is simply deplorable. It is the domain of the worst, and appears immediately after any event), that the plane was shot down by Ukranian fighter jets. Which...wow.
Your credibility among most intellectual people sits somewhere around "none".
The general notion is that these were people operating a weapon system they had limited knowledge of, and motivated by their success the day earlier were a little trigger happy. And FWIW, most weapon systems do not tell you what kind of aircraft you're pointing at (this isn't the movies). Recall the USS Vincennes, with the most advanced fire control system in the world at the time (certainly far more advanced than this unit), shooting down an Iranian jetliner that was ascending and squawking civilian airliner transponder codes.
I would find a study of the brains of conspiracy fanatics fascinating. There is something fundamentally broken there.
For one I didn't say it was shot down by Ukrainian fighter jets, don't put words in my mouth. For two, nowhere did I say it was certain or obvious. I did not claim it either. Watch your arguments, bud. And personal attacks? Please.
Tabloids are having a field day with claims of looting and corpses left to rot as a "final insult to the dead". Yet there has been no video of looters stuffing Euros into their pockets, despite the presence of 24/7 camera crews. Meanwhile others reporters are confirming that bodies are being recovered and sent to the morgue. So who is right?
Another contradiction are claims that "We have compelling evidence that THEY did it" yet at the same time there are headlines saying "THEY'RE destroying the evidence". So which is it? You either have the evidence or you don't, right?
What is reported as "fact" is so often just conjecture, opinion or simply made up, either to support a political narrative or boost ratings. Media reporting should have no bearing on an official investigation, but of course, they will have a huge influence in the court of public opinion.
The media are so desperate to get their ratings up, they'll literally let anybody have their say. Look how MSNBC got punked on the day of the crash:
Military intelligence, in particular that of the US, will already know exactly where that missile was launched from. They have infrared satellites and ground-based monitoring for missile launches in that region already. They're not going to reveal their imagery in public unless no other evidence turns up - but they won't sit on it either.
One could argue that if any side had firm evidence of the other side's culpability they would produce it.
The political damage to the opponent would be of far more real-world value than any possible impact from revealing one's technical ability, which the other side had probably already guessed or been made aware of.
I doubt you'd be here using the internet at all if humans didn't cooperate and form governments together. For all the atrocities caused by nations, saying we should all live as anarcho-savages isn't a solution.
There is no my or someone else's logic. There's logic. If you say it's ok that taxation not only sponsored the development of weapons that killed all those people, but they also provided some good things, then it's exactly equal to saying "my husband beats me sometimes, but he's also a provider for my family, so it's okay and we're working on the beating thing". No. Just no.
The alternative is free market and free enterprise, of course. I don't propose it though. I know people are very stubborn with the old ways. My only hope is that we are going to see no-state and free market in some places on earth and when people are going to see it's good, they're gonna copy that.
I agree. The point of a state should only be about who has responsibility for building the roads and such in that area. Why anyone would kill people to have more roads to pave alludes me (actually, I do know why, but their reasons are not resonating with me).
I wasn't gonna go into a discussion here, but I'm tempted to say that not everyone believes states should have any responsibilities, including building roads. The problem is, you cannot have one without the other. If you have states and taxation, they're gonna trick you into paying for things you don't want or need or even object.
I know that hacker news has more-or-less descended into self parody already, but do we have to have yet another subthread on how gub'mints are the root of all evil? It's especially ironic given that this has happened partly as a result of a lack of stable government in the region.
Personally, I don't see any reason to blame them for either crash. As far as I can tell, pretty much every airline in the world thought that the corridor they were flying over eastern Ukraine was perfectly safe. That flight just had the bad luck to be there at the time some marginally-competent Ukrainian rebel in charge of a high-end anti-aircraft missile system got a little enthusiastic. Could have been any other flight just as easily.
We still don't have any idea what happened to that flight 370, either.
I don't think this will help them, though. I sure wouldn't buy any stock in anything connected to them. Even if nothing about either crash was their fault in any reasonable way, people remember stuff like that.
high-end anti-aircraft system can't be operated by a bunch of drunk wannabe rebels, you need entire support unit of radar observation and command(read on wikipedia what is a BUK battery). stealing that one sorry BUK vehicle would just make it shoot in random direction into the ground not at high speed, high altitude target.
The SA-11 'Buk' TELAR (9A310M1) was indeed designed to be used as part of a broader system including C&C, dedicated launchers, and the 9S18M1 radar. It certainly requires trained personnel to operate.
With that said, the Buk was also designed to surpass its predecessor('Kub') by incorporating a fire control radar into each launcher (TELAR vs TEL), so that it could operate with some autonomy. The original idea was to allow the whole SAM network to track multiple targets independent of the 9S18M1 radar, which would focus on detection and delegation.
This capability also enables an autonomous TELAR unit (as the various images and videos are showing) to target an aircraft at a range of 3-32km, much as people are hypothesizing happened to MH17. It is plausible, although far from certain.
That's why I called them marginally-competent instead of drunk wannabes.
I'm not 100% solid on this, but I have read that they were using just the missile truck without the supporting air-search radar. The missile trucks apparently have fire-control radar and can attack and aircraft by themselves. It seems plausible that they were given or stole just part of the system - the missile truck - and maybe got some manuals or some hasty training from Russian military or something. So they know enough to fire the missiles at a target, but don't have the hardware or training to operate a proper air-search radar and identify their targets carefully first.
Which is why I think it's mostly likely that it was them. Say what you will about the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, I doubt they'd accidentally shoot down a civilian airliner.
Landing transport planes, su-27's on a bomb run, helicopters. Easy targets for simple shoulder fired missiles ,that's what Afghani sheeperds were doing to soviet and american armies - just a dumb Stinger missile
An Antonov AN-26 was shot down at 21,000ft on July 14. Assuming that the Ukrainians don't shoot down their own military aircraft, it was either shot down by the rebels or, possibly, the Russians. The rebels took credit and there is no real evidence that the Russians did it, AFAIK. Also, the twitter comments by the rebels immediately after MH17 crashed, and the conversation between rebel commanders released by the Ukrainians, speak against direct Russian involvement. (And on top of that, although militaries certainly do make big mistakes from time to time, it is clearly more likely that the poorly trained rebels would have made a huge fuck up like this than that the Russian military would have done so.)
Even if it is true that all airlines thought it was safe, I don't see how that is a valid defence.
The simplest research would have told Malaysia Airlines that (a) rebels were shooting down planes in Eastern Ukraine with surface to air missiles; and (b) some surface to air missiles can reach 40,000 feet. Those two facts alone indicate that the region was not safe for commercial airliners.
If all airlines flew through Eastern Ukraine then they are all guilty of abdicating their responsibility to make simple checks about the safety of their flights.
It is not acceptable to say that air traffic authorised the flight. In the cockpit the co-pilot is trained to question the judgement of the pilot. In the same way Malaysia Airlines should have performed simple checks on the information supplied by the air traffic authorities.
What would be needed are not simple checks, but thorough research, which in turn would require reliable local intelligence. The kind one could expect the organisation responsible for ATC to have access to, as opposed to an airline based far, far away.
Sounds dicey. Typical rebels use MANPADS, which have max ranges around 2-4 miles, too small to hit an airliner at cruising altitude. Missile systems with longer ranges tend to be bigger and more complex, and mostly used by well-trained soldiers in proper national militaries who know better than to target airliners. It seems that we have an exception to that here, but it still looks like it was reasonable to assume that they'd be safe.
“Typical rebels” might be unlikely to be able to shoot down a high-altitude plane. But the rebels in Eastern Ukraine had just demonstrated that they could shoot down a plane at 21000 ft. With that information who would conclude that there was less than a 1% chance the rebels were capable of downing a plane at 33,000 ft?
One should note that though Air France from from Paris to Bangkok used to take the route south from the Ukraine, the KLM from AMS to Kuala Lumpur was going through the country, both later merging to the same route over Turkmenistan.
Given that Air France-KLM is a one corporation since 2004, it's pretty surprising. Paris is a bit more south than Amsterdam, but not that much.
FWIW, the NYT's news section has a more detailed examination of the politics and technicalities here...and the OP (who is writing in the opinion section)...seems kind of weak:
I would've posted this link had I seen it earlier...but it is interesting to see how the OP, a pilot himself, thinks MH17 didn't have much cause to change its route. I mean, the OP even acknowledges that the Malaysian Air pilots would've known about the Ukranian cargo plane that was shot down earlier that day...in the NYT news report linked above, the 32,000-ft-restricted altitude left planes exposed to rockets that could strike at twice that height.
Thanks, this article answers some of the questions that were left in my mind from the op-ed, which I was surprised it hadn't discussed. After reading the op-ed, it was unclear to me if lots of airlines were flying through this space, or if Malaysia Airlines was unique in doing so. The way it was written almost made me suspect he was defending Malaysia Airlines for having made an unusual decision to fly through space that other airlines were more prudently avoiding. But the article you link here mentions that flight traffic above 32,000 feet was not much down from pre-restriction levels, so Malaysia Airlines seems to have been doing what was the norm.
While it's nice to think that airlines can just rely on regulators to tell them which flight paths might be unsafe, the reality is that there's no international regulatory agency governing acceptable flight paths. There's a regulatory agency for every country and while one country might have stringent safety measures, another might not.
In such an environment it seems naive for an airlines to not include the safety of the flight path in their calculations. If all civilian flights below 32K feet are forbidden by the Ukrainian authorities, that doesn't automatically mean that flying just 1000 feet above would be safe. Also while other airlines are guilty of flying over war zones too, that doesn't mean Malaysian airlines is not.
It doesn't follow automatically, but given the specific limit, one would assume that it was deliberately chosen and includes an error margin. There's nothing wrong with flying at their assigned altitude, which was above the limit.
In aviation, you have to manage risks, you cannot avoid them entirely. For example, there are different levels of redundancy, depending on how critical a system is. There may be two, three or maybe four units, but there surely aren't 25 units of even the most critical equipment - the plane would be too heavy to take off. At some point, you have to decide what the acceptable risk is, and go with that. I think your argument has a strong hindsight bias.
But with no legal power of enforcement I'm guessing? I mean an airlines can always choose to follow the directives of agencies from other countries that have more stringent standards.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there should be definitely increased public pressure on airlines to include flight safety in their calculations. Or atleast not fly over active war zones..
> After each crash, disaster or terrorist episode, it is natural to point fingers and say, Why didn’t we foresee that specific threat? Thus one attempted shoe bombing leads to a decade of shoes-off orders in security lines. The truth is that air transportation, like most other modern systems, could not operate if it fortified itself against every conceivable peril.
Many people like to use phrases like "one $INCIDENT is one too many". In reality, all of life is about balancing and mitigating risks. Just because a single failure happened in one case doesn't mean the entire system is faulty; given enough time, any system that is not 100% foolproof (that is, all of them) is going to have a failure. The question is whether it is actually feasible and/or reasonable to prevent those.
Only to be repurchased 10ft later for an exorbitant price, because the contents of those bottles went through the most thorough examinations possible and are perfectly safe.
Interesting report on the flight path on BBC news yesterday - they showed that most European airlines flew directly over Ukraine ... British Airways however, have been skirting the country entirely, either going North or South depending on available corridors.
That could just be the usual British "better safe than sorry" mentality, but I suspect they were perhaps given intelligence that suggested unstable rebels had access to SAMs.
Considering the story (true or not) about Coventry not being warned about the German bombers coming for it isn't exactly treated as one of national shame, it isn't quite clear that losing 9 citizens is a big deal to them under these circumstances.
There was an even more interesting report (from the FlightRadar) on the flight path of the plane than was downed. It basically veered off its standard course that was going to the left and under the rebel territory and right over the rebel territory.
Couple this with some reports that the plane was escorted by Ukrainian fighter jets at some point and it stops looking as a clear cut "stupid rebel monkey" case. After all Ukraine has much more to gain from this incident if it blamed on rebels/Russians. They also got the US keenly interested in the whole mess, offering a wealth of experience in steering geo-politically important conflicts the "right way", so this could very well be a staged provaction.
Ah, the conspiracy garbage infects HN. This is exactly why this sort of story does not belong here.
click on other dates and keep an eye on the flight path
You mean that the flight path changed significantly every single day? What does that prove? You do understand that flight paths are set based upon weather, air currents, etc?
As to 33,000 versus 35,000 -- so? What does that prove? The SAM could hit up to 70,000 feet and beyond. That proves utterly nothing.
As to the "Spanish air controller" -- people referring to an anonymous twitter source is simply incredible.
One of the videos that is supposed to prove that the airliner was shot down by pro Russian rebels is one day older than the incident according to the meta data:
The truth probably is that a major propaganda war is under way and we simply do not know (maybe never will know) who is directly to blame for the incident.
The Guardian has a data blog of the airliners flying over the region. Top 5 fliers were Aeroflot (86), Singapore (75), Ukraine (62), Lufthansa (56), Malaysia (48). Really could have been anyone. http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/jul/18/mh17-he...
Unless the plane crash was due to a software bug, this story, however important it is, has no place here. I appreciate your interest and concern but this isn't the right forum.
This is a systems bug based on an underestimation of a technical bug, i.e. that flying 1,000 feet over a 32,000 feet restricted altitude was considered "safe" given the hardware used. Such an assumption ended up being wrong. OTOH, the OP makes the point that diverting flights isn't as simply as moving the joystick in a different direction, given the nature of crowded airspace and routes. It's also interesting to note, as the OP does, that flights at lower altitudes were routinely conducted over Afghanistan and Iraq.
I actually think the OP is overstating his case though...but I posted it here because I know there are flight enthusiasts who care about the details, such as whether 1,000 ft. above a restricted altitude is not much more reckless than speeding 63 mph over 65.
HN will be a sad place if it concerns itself only with bugs in pure logic, and not all the bugs and misunderstandings of details and mechanics that exist outside of software code.
The point is this has nothing to do with software or anything of interest to Hacker news. Why bother reading HN if it's going to be cluttered with posts and comments that clearly belong elsewhere (Huffingtonpost.com, Disqus, Twitter whatever...) then some sour grapes crybaby who seeks attention voted down your Karma to prove a point. I'll still read HN but some participants are just trollish. I'll never hire or work with anyone with the usernames above because in my world civility and good behavior counts, even with the "little things" like respecting HN guidelines (see below) but it's your life and do what you want with it. Sooner or later you'll put your foot in your mouth in the very worst way and panic all day over your mistake.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
"Malaysian officials said an airline could not be expected to have the intelligence information and other resources to make independent determinations to avoid an area where air traffic controllers were still sending planes. But some carriers had already done just that. China Airlines, the flagship carrier of Taiwan, said that it had avoided flying over all of Ukraine since April 4. Korean Airlines and Asiana Airlines also confirmed that they had not flown planes through Ukrainian airspace since March 3."
It also looks like Air France and British Airways avoided Ukraine entirely [2]
And even if all airlines had made the mistake of flying over Ukraine, it is absurd to suggest that an airline might not have the "intelligence information and other resources" to make an independent judgement about safety. A single person spending half an hour on the internet would determine that (a) the rebels were shooting down planes using surface-to-air missiles; and (b) there are some surface-to-air missiles that can reach an altitude of 40,000 feet. That is all the information you need to conclude that the area isn't safe for commercial airplanes.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/europe/downing-of-pl...
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/17/world/europe/m...