Don't Blame Malaysia Airlines
Four other airlines flew along this Ukrainian route more frequently than the beleaguered flag carrier of Malaysia did. Would we make the same assumptions about negligence if the rocket had hit a Lufthansa airplane? The people to blame here are the ones who brought the plane down.
I have an op-ed in Saturday morning's NYT, whose title gets across its point: "Don't Blame Malaysia Airlines."
Short version: Airlines rely on regulators and national and international bodies to tell them about airspace they should avoid. Absent such warnings, airspace is presumptively legal and safe for transit. MH17 was following the rules by staying out of no-fly and warning zones. A terrible crime and disaster occurred, but that is not Malaysia Air's fault.
Shorter still: According to Spiegel (German version here), while some airlines, including Air France, had changed their routes to avoid Ukraine, most did not. Many other airlines took a path similar to the one on which MH17 was shot down, notably including Lufthansa. Here is Spiegel's chart of how many planes had gone this way in the week before yesterday's disaster;
Lufthansa, as flag carrier for that paragon of efficiency, Germany, had taken the route more often than did Malaysia Air. So too (according to Spiegel, with data from FlightRadar.com) with Singapore Airlines, famously high-end and responsible airline. Any of them could have met the fate that tragically befell the 298 people on MH17. Indeed, also according to Spiegel, some other first-world airliners were not far from MH17 when it was shot down. Somehow I suspect that if it had been a Lufthansa plane that was attacked, there would be fewer starting-point assumptions that the carrier had somehow been cutting corners at the cost of its passengers' safety. (Thanks to Chua Chin Hon of the Straits Times for noticing this graphic.)
Malaysia Airlines and its home country, where all of the flight crew and more than 40 of the passengers came from, are among the damaged parties in this case, not among those doing damage. Sympathies to them and all others affected by this catastrophe.
Update see the remarks from the always-sensible Patrick Smith at Ask the Pilot. Among his points:
It is fairly routine for civilian jetliners to overfly areas of conflict. Dozens of airline flights pass each day over Baghdad, for example (many of them land there). I’ve personally piloted flights over eastern Ukraine, close to where the Malaysia Airlines 777 met its fate on Thursday....
In a lot of respects these tragedies are less about air safety than they are about dangers and conflicts on the ground. If a government or rogue faction shoots down a commercial plane, is that really an “air safety issue”?