Guarding against missile attacks: Why MH17 incident is scarily off-script

We do not know yet who shot down MH17 over Ukraine. Ukraine’s government want to blame Russia-supporting rebels. Russia’s Vladmir Putin says Ukraine’s military campaign is to blame.

US Vice President Joe Biden says Ukraine has accepted the offer of U.S. experts to help investigate the crash which he said was “not an accident, the plane was blown out of the sky”. That will surely annoy Putin.

While the truth is still murky, the accusations and counter-accusations have the familiarity of a Cold War script. But while the charges seem to be dusting off an old script, what happened MH17 is something scarily off-script.

Aircrafts have faced the threat of hijack for almost as long as we have flown the skies.

Back in 1931 armed revolutionaries hijacked a Ford Tri-Motor in Peru. In 1969, 82 airplanes were hijacked in a single year. Far away places like Mogadishu and Entebbe suddenly showed up on front pages of our newspapers as hijack dramas unfolded on the tarmacs of their airports. There were paperbacks that told those stories as real-life thrillers – Assault at Mogadishu, Ninety Minutes at Entebbe.

Hijacking, however horrendous, had a certain logic, they followed a certain path. The hijackers’ identity was usually quickly known and the question became “What do they want?” It was not a whodunit as much as a “whydunit”.

The answer to that “why” was usually fairly quickly known as well.

When Lufthansa Flight LH 181 landed in Mogadishu, the hijackers demanded the release of ten Red Army Faction terrorists and two Palestinian prisoners in Turkey and a ransom of $10 million.

Indian Airlines Flight 814 was taken to Kandahar and the hijackers asked for the release of Islamists held in India prisons.

Air France Flight 139 was hijacked mid-air after leaving Tel Aviv and landed in Entebbe, Uganda and the hijackers demanded the release of political prisoners including 40 Palestinians held in Israel. A Mossad operation stormed Entebbe and rescued the hostages. It was led, incidentally, by Yonatan Netanyahu who was killed in the attack. His brother is now the Prime Minister of Israel.

Hijacking was mostly about politics – ideological war played out in an ampitheatre thousands of feet above the ground. An airplane was diverted somewhere. Demands were made – release of prisoners, money, safe passage.

Air India Flight 182 blew that script out of the sky in 1985.

The Boeing 747 jumbo jet took off from Canada not knowing it was carrying a bomb in its luggage. It blew up over the Atlantic Ocean killing 329 people. This too was political – an act of revenge by Sikh extremists for Operation Blue Star in India. But there were no demands. It was just bloody retribution.

That led to far more stringent baggage checks to ensure that a suitcase could never sneak on board without a passenger. The logic there, was that no hijacker would check in a bomb and then board the plane. That would be just suicidal. Hijackers were not kamikazes.

9/11 dispelled that myth forever. This was hijack explicitly as suicide – a horrifically spectacular mass murder intended to be played out in real time on television screens all over the world for maximum effect. It was both unprecedented and hitherto unimaginable even to a world that was quite used to hijacking as a political weapon. German Chancellor Gerhart Schroder called it a “declaration of war against the civilized world”. 60,000 spectators observed a minute’s silence in a football stadium in Tehran.

That hijacking dramatically changed the way we fly. Now we are used to airports becoming a sort of special place where we surrender many of our liberties. There are mysterious no-fly lists and enhanced pat-downs and invasive body x-rays. In the US safety became colour-coded – red, orange, yellow. We take our shoes off and carry liquids, aerosols and gels in little containers in transparent plastic bags in our hand luggage. The list of household items we cannot carry aboard gets ever longer. Airplane cockpits got reinforced doors. The USA got the Patriot Act and passenger data-sharing is now the norm.

“Aviation is more secure today than in 2001,” says IATA. “But this has come at a great price in terms of passenger convenience and industry costs.”

The basic lesson from 9/11 was to control as fully as possible who got on board and what they carried with them. The hope was that could create a bubble of safety once the craft was airborne – the passengers had been frisked, patted down and scanned. There were no sharp-edged household items in their luggage that could turn into weapons mid-air. But we were thinking that the danger came from within the aircraft.

MH17 exposes the deadly loophole in that argument. MH17 made no distress call because it did not know it was in the target of a missile from the ground. CNN aviation expert, Richard Quest, says from the ground one can simply look up and tell whether a plane was a commercial aircraft. “So something is absolutely appalling that’s gone on here,” he says.

That’s what bone-chilling about MH17. An aircraft can take all the precautions possible and still be utterly vulnerable as it flies through an air-corridor deemed safe till now. It’s an act of mayhem that does not even require the careful planning and coordination that went into 9/11. This was not about making a political statement by flying into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. This feels almost as random as swatting a fly. Any airplane would have done.

It’s not that this is the first instance of a civilian aircraft brought down by external fire. A Korean airliner was shot down by a Soviet fighter plane in 1983. A US warship accidentally downed an Iran jetliner in 1988. Israeli jets downed a Libyan airplane that had strayed into the Sinai peninsula under Israeli control in 1973.

But there were explanations in most of those cases. An aircraft had wandered off course into someone else’s airspace. Someone made an error in judgment somewhere. Someone acted too hastily or responded too slowly to a warning signal. The results were disastrous but we could take comfort in the notion that it was more human error and crossed wires than sheer bloody-mindedness.

MH17 offers us no such crumbs of reassurance. All we know is a surface-to-air missile tracked an aircraft right before this plane went down. Over the next few days we might get some answers to who might have done it. Once we know whodunit we might get to know why they did it.

But the answers will not change the fact that the rules have changed once again. The unimaginable has become real. In its fiery descent from the skies MH17 marks a new frontier in the fear of flying.