Trigger-happy men star in history of passenger plane shoot-downs

In the action-packed American political thriller Scandal, President Fitzgerald Thomas is faced with a ghost from the past code-named Operation Remington.

Turns out President Fitz did not have a decorated military service as the public was led to believe. His career in the military prior to his presidency had pretty bad skeletons, including a terrible mistake that claimed 300 innocent lives.

In between the twists and turns of cover-ups and guilt trips, we learn that Fitz was in fact part of a mission in Iceland that took down a civilian airliner carrying more than 300 passengers, including the mother of his mistress, Olivia Pope.

This “act of terrorism” comes back to haunt him as it threatens to destabilise the very core of his administration and status as “the leader of the free world”.

Trust Hollywood to think the unthinkable... and man to make it happen. As you read this, the world is still trying to wrap its head around the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet carrying 298 people from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that, it is claimed, was shot down in eastern Ukraine by separatist rebels last week.

All on board the Boeing 777 perished. Both the Ukranian military and separatist rebels have denied shooting down the plane.

However, pundits are pushing several theories, the most wild being that the plane was mistakenly shot down by the Ukrainian government after it mistook it for the official jet of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The thinking is that Ukraine wants Putin dead over his experiment in the east of the country.

A Russian newspaper — Russia Today — quoted the Interfax News Agency as saying the Russian President was flying the same path over Ukraine at a similar time on his return from Brazil.

However, this theory was immediately invalidated by claims that the report had been contradicted by other news outlets, which maintain that Putin had not recently flown over Ukraine.

The reports might be contradicted, but history shows that passenger planes that have been shot down in the past were often mistakes. In the rare tragic events of civilians’ plane shoot-downs, confusion is always rife over whether the target was military or civilians.

History also shows that this is not the first time it has happened on Ukrainian soil. It first happened 13-years ago. Here, a brief history of shoot-downs...

Siberian Airlines Flight 1812
October 2001

The Siberian Airlines Flight 1812 was shot down and crashed into the Black Sea on October 4, 2001, killing all the 78 passengers on board.

The plane was heading to Novosibirsk, Russia from Tel Aviv, Israel. At first, the Ukrainian military vehemently denied its involvement but later admitted that it has mistakenly shot the plane during a training exercise.

Lionair Flight 602
September 29, 1998

In 1998, Lionair Flight 602 fell into the sea off the north-western coast of Sri Lanka and all of the 48 passengers perished. Wreckage of the aircraft was only discovered 14 years later, in 2012, by a Sri Lankan navy vessel.

It is not certain how it crashed, but initial reports claimed the plane was shot down by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels.

Following the downing of Flight LN 602 all civil aviation between Colombo and Jaffna was suspended for many months by the Civil Aviation Authority.

Transair Georgia,
September 1993

Three civilian planes belonging to Transair Georgia were hit by missiles over three consecutive days beginning September 21, 1993. A total of 136 people were killed.

Two planes were hit by Abkhazian rebel missiles, with 27 people killed aboard one and 108 on the other. A third plane came under fire as it was being boarded, leaving one crew member dead.

Iran Air Flight 655
July 3, 1988

On July 3, 1988, crew on the US Navy cruiser Vincennes mistook Iran Air Flight 655, an Airbus A300, for an F-14 fighter jet sold to Iran before the 1979 revolution.

The US Navy fired two missiles, shooting down the jet. All 290 passengers and crew members were killed. Iran condemned the incident, calling it a “criminal act”, an “atrocity” and a “massacre”, while the US maintained it was a misunderstanding.

The case led Iran to begin legal proceedings against the US in the International Court of Justice in 1996. The American government later compensated the families of victims.

Air Rhodesia Flight 825 (Hunyani)
September 3, 1978

This flight was shot down by Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) guerillas during the Rhodesian Bush War. An attempted crash-landing in a cotton farm in Karoi was hampered by an unseen ditch which caused it to cartwheel and break-up.

There were 52 passengers on board and 38 died in the crash. The guerillas then approached the wreckage, rounded up the 10 survivors they could see and gunned them down.

Three passengers survived by hiding in the surrounding bush, while a further five lived because they had gone to look for water before the guerrillas arrived.

Zipra leader Joshua Nkomo claimed responsibility for shooting down the Hunyani on BBC television the same evening, saying the aircraft had been used for military purposes, but denied that his men had killed survivors on the ground.

El Al Flight 402
July 27, 1955

The international passenger flight from London to Tel Aviv via Vienna and Istanbul strayed into Bulgarian airspace and was shot down by two Bulgarian MiG-15 jet fighters before it crashed near Petrich, Bulgaria.

All seven crew and 51 passengers on board were killed. At the time of the crash, the Eastern Bloc and the West had severed their relationship during one of the harshest stand-offs over the Cold War.

After investigations into the accident, the following statement was issued in a bid to explain the probable cause: “The aircraft sustained a hit or hits which caused loss of pressurisation and a fire in the heater compartment.

“The aircraft broke up in mid-air due to explosion caused by bullets hitting the right wing and probably the left wing together with a projectile or projectiles of large calibre in the rear end of the fuselage.”

Korean Airlines Flight 007,
September 1, 1983

Korean Airlines flight KAL 007 was travelling from New York to Seoul with a stopover in Anchorage when it veered off its usual flight path into Soviet territory.

Two Soviet fighter jets intercepted the plane and ordered it to change trajectory, but the passenger plane’s pilot is said to have failed to respond.

A missile strike sent the flight on a harrowing tailspin into the Sea of Japan. All 269 people on board perished, including 61 Americans. The incident added to the Cold War intrigue and to this day is a favourite subject for conspiracy theorists.

The United States at the time dubbed it a “massacre” while the Soviets accused the US of hatching a deliberate provocation. Inquiries since the fall of the USSR seem to point to the event being a sad misunderstanding.

Soviet leaders initially denied knowledge of the incident but later admitted the country’s role, claiming that the aircraft had been on a spy mission.

Libyan Airlines Flight 114,
21 February 1973

At 10:30pm, a plane left Tripoli to Cairo via Benghazi. Unfortunately, it got lost because of a combination of bad weather and equipment failure as it hovered over northern Egypt at around 1:44pm local time.

At 1:54pm, the flight started overflying the Sinai desert, cruising at a height of 20,000 feet (6,100 metres) towards Israel. Two minutes later, two Israeli Air Force F-4 fighters hurried to investigate and they intercepted the airliner at 1:59pm.

The Israeli fighter pilots attempted to make visual contact with the passenger airliner’s crew and tried to communicate to them — by signaling with their hands, dipping their wings and firing warning shots — that they should follow the F-4s back to Rephidim Air Base.

The 727 crew’s response was interpreted as a denial of that request. The 727 turned back to the west, and the Israeli pilots interpreted this as an attempt to flee and shot down the plane.

Of those on board, 113 people perished and five survived, including the co-pilot, who later explained that the flight crew knew the Israeli jets wanted them to land but relations between Israel and Libya made them decide against it.

Arkia Airlines, Nov 28, 2002
Mombasa, Kenya

This was a near miss in a series of terrorist attacks generally known as “2002 Mombasa attacks”. Two surface-to-air missiles were fired at the chartered Boeing 757 airliner owned by Israel-based Arkia Airlines as it took off from Moi International Airport.

The Arkia charter company had a regular weekly service flying tourists between Tel Aviv and Mombasa. The Kenya Police discovered a missile launcher and two missile casings in the Changamwe area of Mombasa, about two kilometres from the airport.

The pilots planned on an emergency landing in Nairobi after seeing the two missiles streak past them, but decided to continue to Israel. The airliner landed at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv about five hours later, escorted by Israeli F-15 fighter jets. Following the attack, all flights from Israel to Kenya were cancelled.

Family wiped out

An entire family of six that had been returning home after three years living abroad was among the 44 Malaysians killed in the MH17 disaster, media reports said Saturday.

Tambi Jiee, 49, and his wife Ariza Ghazalee, 46, perished along with their four children when the Malaysia Airlines flight went down in eastern Ukraine.

They were reportedly returning to Malaysia after her husband’s three-year posting in Kazakhstan for energy giant Shell, first taking a short European holiday. Images of a wailing Jamilah Noriah Abang Anuar, 72 — Ariza’s mother — dominated front pages of Malaysian dailies on Saturday.

“I lost my daughter and her family in a blink of an eye,” the New Straits Times quoted her as saying from her home in the eastern Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo island.

“Ariza had posted a photo on Facebook showing the family’s luggage as they prepared to embark from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport for the flight to Kuala Lumpur.

“17 July 2014, starting our new hijrah (journey), Alhamdulillah (praise God),” read the accompanying message. Her son Afzal Tambi also posted his thanks and farewells to friends from Kazakhstan on Thursday.

“Before it gets too cheesy, I just want to thank everyone who made it bearable for me to live here and for sharing with me amazing memories to reminisce on,” he wrote.

The Boeing 777 came down with 298 onboard in a separatist-held region of Ukraine, with the United States claiming it was shot down in a missile attack, a possible casualty of the Kiev government’s battle with pro-Russia rebels.