- An Azerbaijan Airlines flight crashed after sustaining damage over Russia, killing 38.
- The plane was likely hit by Russian air defense before the crash, BI reported Thursday.
- Several airlines, including Azerbaijan Airlines, El Al, Flydubai, and Qazaq Air, are canceling flights to Russia, citing passenger safety and risks.
If they were going to deliberately target passenger airliners they wouldnt do it over their own soil. This is a major embarrassment that reflects poorly on the quality of their equipment and personnel.
It’s not necessarily some intentional conspiracy, but rather the question of care and communication, etc.
Everyone knows their IFF is dogshit. There’s a surprising regularity to airlines being shot down, even before the war.
A UAE-based airline’s planes are going to be less likely to fall through the cracks, so to speak, than an Azerbaijan-based airline’s
Which is crazy because all those airliners are squawking ADS-B while in the air, it’s not some complicated IFF system like you’d find on a fighter jet. Shit, I can pick up ADS-B when airliners fly over my house with a cheap ass SDR dongle and antenna.
Part of it might also be that sometimes, military or intelligence flights might squawk ads-b with a spoofed signal to blend into the overall traffic.
It isn’t that they didn’t know they were there, it’s that they didn’t believe the ID. It’s not just the hardware that’s the problem. (The hardware is dogshit, but so are the people using it. People are part of the system, too, and they’re fairly poorly trained.)