“It is expected that insurgents and terrorists do not own high-altitude SAM systems.”
3 days before MH17, a military cargo plane was shot down in this warzone at 21,000 feet.
That is FAR above the range of hand held AA missiles.
Only one day before MH17 a second military plane was shot down.
It would have been common sense to simply divert traffic around the warzone, a small percent of Ukraine.
It would have cost only a few minutes fuel.
Instead Ukraine and civil aviation simply raised the minimum flight altitude in the area.
All USA airlines, British Airways, Lufthansa, Asiana, Qantas and many others avoided the warzone by policy.
Pilots complained about the danger of the overflights to both civil aviation and the airlines themselves. Some traded shifts to avoid the flights specifically out of this concern:
There’s also gross misinformation out there that claims huge numbers of planes flew the exact same path as MH17.
The way this claim works is by defining all overflights of Ukraine as “the same path”.
But Ukraine is the biggest country fully within Europe and the warzone was a tiny percent of Ukraine. The overwhelming majority of flights taking this route did not come close to overflying the warzone itself as MH17 did.
TexasGator just wrote in post 18 that The American Federal Aviation Administration did not restrict that region. These around 900 overflights by various airlines during the past 7 days were not for 603,628 km² Ukraine, but for 140km radius around Donetsk (1,500 km²).