Malaysian Airline MH17: What We Know About the Crash

It was Thursday morning. The Malaysian Airline Boeing 777-200ER (flight MH17) was all set to take off from Amsterdam (Netherlands) to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) when a Dutch passenger Cor Pan tweet a joke about this Malaysian airline as

"If it disappears, this is what it looks like"

The flight was on its way to Amsterdam and 11 hours before its landing, it disappeared from the radar. The last time it was seen on radar, it reported the location in Ukraine. It was first reported as:

A Malaysian plane en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur disappeared from radar at 10,000 meters and then crashed near the city of Shakhtarsk in Ukraine's Donetsk region, a source in the Ukrainian law enforcement authorities said.

Not long after, a tweet from Malaysia Airlines confirmed it had lost contact with MH17.

MH17 crashed in a field near the village of Hrabove just north of Torez, which is close to the Russian border and in the stronghold of pro-Russian rebels.

Locals found the wreckage and initial reports by Reuters said the plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile.

Passengers

There were 298 passengers on-board including the plane crew members. The list of these passengers is:

Netherlands (189)
Malaysia (44)
Australia (27)
Indonesia (12)
United Kingdom (10)
Germany (4)
Belgium (4)
Philippines (3)
Canada (1)
New Zealand (1) 

- The nationality of 3 passengers could not be verified.

Travelling Route of the Plane

The plane had to travel from the following route in order to reach its destination:

Germany >> Poland >> Ukraine >> Caspian Sea >> Iran >> Afghanistan >> Pakistan >> India >> Netherlands

What actually happened to the plane?

Initially it was reported that the plane had lost its control due to technical reasons. According to the media reports, the plane went down without a distress call, so whatever happened, happened quickly. As yet, it is not clear who is responsible. 

But later, it was discovered that the plane is actually shot down with land-air missiles.

Was planes flying over the war zone?

The plane was flying 33,000 feet when it vanished from the sky. Ukrainian authorities had previously closed the airspace below 32,000 feet and many flights were still on a flightpath above this height.

Mikael Robertsson from flight tracking website Flightradar24 told Wired although flights had cooled in this area in recent times, there were two flights following the same path with 10 minutes of MH17 disappearance.

After the plane's crash all of the eastern Ukrainian air space had been closed to commercial flights, Eurocontrol said.

In the previous weeks, several military planes in the skies above Russia and Ukraine have been in the firing line. On Thursday, Ukraine claimed Russian rebels shot down an Air Force plane with an air-to-air missile. 

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