Comment by MarkMc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MarkMc | Hacker News Reader

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.

[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...

Many other airlines continued to fly over the Ukraine, even most respected airlines like Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines:

http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/bild-981813-726883.html

As I pointed in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8057808 :

While Air France avoided Ukraine, KLM did not. Given that AF-KLM is a one airline holding [1], that's rather surprising discrepancy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France%E2%80%93KLM

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.

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