Justice, of a Kind, For MH17
November 19, 2022
LAST WEEK, a court in Holland found three men responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 eight years ago.
Back in 2014, operating in eastern Ukraine, they were part of a separatist group under Russian control, responsible for firing the “Buk” rocket that struck the Boeing 777 at 33,000 feet during a flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Cruising just above restricted commercial airspace, the plane had been misidentified as a military target. The men — Igor Firkin, Sergei Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko — were found guilty in absentia and sentenced to life. Currently free and living in Russia, it’s unlikely they ever will serve time.
MH17 was carrying 298 people from 17 countries, including 80 children. That ghastly total puts MH17 at number seven among the deadliest air disasters of all time. In the Netherlands, where 196 of the victims lived, the catastrophe was and remains front-page news. Strangely, the rest of the world seems to have forgotten about it. It never stayed in the headlines for especially long, and shortly thereafter it ceased to be much of a topic, even in aviation circles. It’s peculiar how many lesser disasters, even those that occurred decades ago, are fresher in our minds. Ask a pilot about MH17 and you’re liable to get a blank stare. “Which one was that?”
Is that a symptom of our diminished attention spans, or something else? Maybe it was the certain-ness of the accident, and the ugly brutality of it. Unlike many crashes, there was no mystery or mystique surrounding this one. From the very first day it was clear what had happened, and it was pretty grotesque.
It’s also true that Malaysia Airlines had already earned its fifteen minutes of infamy. It’s the carrier’s other major mishap, earlier that same year, that is more widely remembered and discussed. That’d be MH370, of course, the vanished 777, only a few parts of which have ever been found, washed up on beaches on Mauritius and Reunion islands. That one gets people talking, albeit nonsensically much of the time.
MH17 wasn’t the first commercial jet downed by the Russians. Many of you will remember the tragedy of Korean Air Lines flight 007 in 1983. The Boeing 747 was on a flight from New York to Seoul when it strayed off course and was blown up by a Soviet fighter jet. The worldwide outrage the followed was a lot more intense than anything stoked by MH17.
Ditto after the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iran Air jetliner in July, 1988, killing 290 people.
The Iran Air incident sits at number eight on that list of deadliest disasters. KAL 007 was, until 2014, the tenth worst, nudged to number eleven by MH17. This means that three of history’s eleven worst crashes were planes brought down by missiles. Add in Lockerbie (number 10), plus the 1985 Air India bombing (number 5), and five of the worst eleven — nearly half — were either missiles or bombs.
It’s not entirely fair, lumping those together. The bombings were deliberate; the shoot-downs were cases of mistaken identity. We will save for later the bigger and deeper conversation over what does or doesn’t constitute an “accident,” and the sticky applications of culpability. MH17, Iran Air, KAL 007; each of these involved a certain amount of recklessness. At what point, though, does an error become criminal?
And this isn’t the first time someone has been convicted in absentia for destroying a commercial plane. In 1999, a court in Paris found six Libyans guilty for the bombing of UTA flight 772 ten years earlier, including the brother-in-law of Moammar Khadafy. None of the six stood trial. The explosion, over a remote part of the Sahara, killed 170 people. A U.S. judge later ordered Libya to pay $6 billion in damages on behalf of seven Americans who’d been on board.
Some of my U.S. readers have asked why the Malaysia Airlines flights are always referred to alpha-numerically: MH17 and MH370. Most Americans don’t realize that flight numbers are prefixed by a two-character airline code. The code for Malaysia Airlines is MH. In the United States we normally drop these prefixes, but they are used routinely elsewhere. This is discussed in more detail in chapter seven of my book.
And the name of the airline is Malaysia Airlines. It’s not “Malaysian Airlines,” and certainly not “Malaysian Air.”
Malaysia Airlines was formed in the early 1970s after its predecessor, Malaysia-Singapore Airlines (MSA), split to become Singapore Airlines and Malaysia Airlines. Both carriers are renowned for their outstanding service, and cabin crews of both airlines wear the iconic, floral-pattern “Sarong Kabaya” batik — an adaptation of the traditional Malay kebaya blouse.
Malaysia Airlines’ logo, pictured above, is an indigenous kite known as the Wau. True story: In 1993 I was in the city of Kota Bahru, a conservative Islamic town in northern Malaysia close to the Thai border, when we saw a group of little kids flying Wau kites. At the time I didn’t realize where the airline’s logo had come from, but I recognized the pattern immediately. It was one of those airline/culture crossover moments that we aerophiles really savor.
Related Stories:
DISASTER OVER TEHRAN
PERMANENT MYSTERY. MH370, EIGHT YEARS ON.
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20 Responses to “Justice, of a Kind, For MH17”
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+Rod says: …. the Russians were stupid not to have confessed instantly, explaining their criminal negligence. Instead the Kremlin launched a silly campaign of ever more bizarre denials …..
Bizarre, indeed. Somewhat similar to the works of fiction issued by France’s Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile. (BEA)
….. Ask a pilot about MH17 and you’re liable to get a blank stare. “Which one was that?”
….. Is that a symptom of our diminished attention spans, or something else ….?
It’s mostly “something else.”
The Flight Number was/is just that. The (in this instance) atrocity was perpetrated against an actual aircraft: a Boeing B-777-200ER, registered M9-MRD — and its passengers and crew.
How few remember “Air France Flight 4590?” American “Flight 191?” Or KLM’s “Flight 4805?”
Reply to Clark — Yes, I’m willing to believe (nobody Really knows) it was deliberate, & they were banking on the Soviets not daring to shoot down a 747.
The Koreans did indeed have a history of poor navigation that oddly took them over the USSR. And they were right above one of the most sensitive military areas.
And to chime in on the moral equivalency argument of the USS Vincennes/Iran Air 655 tragedy, in comparison to KAL 007 and MH 17, it should be noted that the US government did pay Iran restitution to the tune of some $150 million a year later, if I recall correctly, even if it did not issue a formal apology. Contrast that with the Soviet and Russian governments, respectively, lying and dissembling rather than taking any responsibility for their actions. And in the KAL case there was little doubt the fighter pilot knew he was shooting down a civilian airliner, as did his superiors who ordered it. Seems to me there is a difference in moral culpability, not an instance of American “special treatment.”
To Rod, years ago I read a book that promoted the conspiracy theory that KAL 007 was on a secret Cold War spying mission at the behest of the US government, and it drifted off-course deliberately in order to “light up” a new Soviet radar array that the CIA/Pentagon wanted to know about. A lot of loose strings about supposed cooperation between Korean and US CIA, a history of Korean pilots from the military, etc. No smoking gun, all circumstantial arguments, but an interesting read, if not terribly convincing.
Reply to Alan Dahl — No idea. But:
1) It was way up over Sakhalin Island with no available airport it could get to (presumably) & there were Soviet fighters right there intent on shooting it down. United 232 was over the US Midwest.
2) Wouldn’t those have been heat-seeking missiles, i.e. explode in or near an engine & probably irrevocably damage a wing?
MH17 was shattered with shrapnel, but that was from a huge SAM.
Question for Patrick: Does the pilot community buy the explanation that 007 was Accidentally off-course? I mean sure, that’s always possible. But KAL seemed to have a funny way of stuff like that happening.
Correct me on this but I thought that KAL 007 wasn’t “blown up” as such but rather shrapnel from a missile punctured the rear pressure bulkhead and severed 3 of the 4 the hydraulic lines similar to what happened with United 232 (plus the aileron crossover cable). Unfortunately the KAL crew didn’t manage the miracle that Al Haynes and his crew pulled off and lost control about 5 minutes after the missile damaged the tail area eventually resulting in an in-flight breakup.
Patrick: “MH17 was an error (…). They THOUGHT they were shooting at a military plane. The same with the Ukrainian 737 over Tehran a few years ago. You could argue they all were mistaken identity errors, with the possible exception of KAL 007. With that one, it’s not certain they knew they were firing at a civilian passenger jet.”
Late to the discussion but agree completely. I seriously doubt the Soviets intentionally shot down a 747 full of passengers, if for no other reason than bad publicity. Korean Airlines had a history of mighty odd “navigation errors” (this was not the first time the Soviets had shot down one of their planes) & here they were over one of the most sensitive places in the Soviet Far East.
The Soviets probably thought it was an airborne Trojan Horse.
As for MH17, the Russians were stupid not to have confessed instantly, explaining their mistake. Instead they launched a silly campaign of ever more bizarre denial.
That said, I wouldn’t rule out the whole thing being set up by the Ukrainians to run a massive burn on the Russians. Just wait for dumb-dumb Malaysia Airlines to pass over your war zone, then send in your decoy to make them fire their missile & shoot down MH17.
I have no idea whether this happened, but it’s possible.
Regarding MH17, it’s always sad to think knowing so many children were on board to have to face such a frightful, terrible fate. There’s still worse fates, slower ones (yes there’s the fall), but the shock of it actually happening in a split second also contributes…
YES. Love the airline/culture crossovers too. It really personifies the airplane and makes it represent the country it is flying for. Hawaiian and Alaska are two obvious examples. Fiji Air looks very Pacific. Aeromexico to an extent.
It’s not often I disagree with you, Patrick, but in this instance to say MH17 has been largely forgotten and not talked about a lot may apply in the US, but not elsewhere. It’s a pretty parochial statement to make! It’s a major news and discussion point in Australia, and will likely remain so due to the dozens of Aussies who were aboard.
The MH17/MH370 incident kinda made MH look worse than its contemporaries in SeA
Simon – “To the non-Americans that read this site let me just say not all of us in America believe in special treatment for ourselves.”
As a foreigner (born in Britain, living in Australia), I’ll say that part of what you’re saying here is true, but we shouldn’t just single out America. Large parts of the rest of the world chose to turn a blind eye to Iran Air 655, partly because we give the Americans a free pass for everything, but in large part also because we just totally failed to value those Iranian lives. They’re from a country whose government we don’t like, so those lives don’t matter.
MH17 has always had a lot of coverage in Australia: there were a lot of Australians on board. Last week’s verdict got loads of coverage, and our foreign minister, for whom I usually have a lot of respect, demanded that Russia hand over the offenders to face justice.
Australia never demanded that the Iran Air 655 offenders be handed over to an international court to face justice. So I don’t think we have a leg to stand on.
What happened to MH17 was tragic. And it was an accident. It was, by any reasonable set of metrics, exactly the same as Iran Air 655: in both cases, a military force mistook an airliner for a threat, and shot it down and killed a large number of innocent civilians.
I don’t know whether the perpetrators in either case should “face justice”, or what that “justice” should be: it’s a really difficult question. But I do know that demanding such “justice” for one set of perpetrators but not the other is absolutely indefensible.
There’s a memorial to MH17 in Canberra, in the grounds of our Parliament building. It’s a plaque with the names of the Australian victims, and there’s some soil from the crash site. There’s a memorial to Iran Air 655 in the gardens of the former US Embassy in Tehran – it’s the burned-out remains of what’s said to be one of the engines from the plane. I’ve seen both. I used to drive past Lockerbie a lot, too. They’re all sad, but only Lockerbie was deliberate.
I do note very different framing: while in the case of KAL the airliner “was blown up by a Soviet fighter jet”, when the USS Vincennes downed an Iranian airliner, it was just “accidentally shot down”.
To the non-Americans that read this site let me just say not all of us in America believe in special treatment for ourselves. Moral superiority comes from acting superior and needs to be earned through action — so when you act like a thug you lose that high ground and instead put yourself on the level of criminals. And I say that as somebody who loves the Navy and despises the Iranian mullahs.
Really, Simon? You’re reaching here. Could it be that I chose those phrasings simply to avoid grammatical repetition? I’m happy to swap it around, so that the Vincennes did the blowing up. Would that make it better? I’ve never stated or felt that the Iran Air downing wasn’t reckless.
Perhaps the Iran Air shutdown was an accident, but didn’t the commander of Vincennes get an award from POTUS? The US could have been a lot more apologetic for the deadly mistake. I don’t know if this claim is true but there are some who claim Lockerbie was revenge for that (ultimately ordered by Iran more than by Libya). And for billion dollar warships to confuse a civilian jet on a routine flight with a very different military plane (with different electronic emissions) suggests this high tech weaponry isn’t so smart after all.
I think one of the more fascinating examples of the airline/culture crossover is the Koru symbol of Air New Zealand. It has deep significance in Maori culture and which is contemporized to reflect Air New Zealand’s brand ethos.
Though Iran Air was a error: Vincennes thought they had an IRAF F-14 coming at them; MH370 & Korean Air were deliberate downings. Recent A320 in Iran is debateable – but the situation was hot after US drone’d the IR general in Baghdad!
Well, MH17 was an error as well. They THOUGHT they were shooting at a military plane. The same with the Ukrainian 737 over Tehran a few years ago. You could argue they all were mistaken identity errors, with the possible exception of KAL 007. With that one, it’s not certain they knew they were firing at a civilian passenger jet.