[sumofproducts]

You're thinking of SM-3, not SM-2, and SM-3's minimum altitude is somewhere in the rarefied upper atmosphere when it burns out and can separate the kill vehicle. Not even the abortive SM-2 Block IV was hit-to-kill.

That said, all SAMs without nose proxy fuzing are /theoretically/ capable of directly impacting their targets. Only a scant handful of ABM-specialized interceptors are designed to do so in order to ensure either complete warhead destruction OR a miss that doesn't produce a boatload of shredded debris clutter.

A direct hit would shred a huge amount of of the airplane, the expanding cloud of non-warhead missile bits would blow a hole through the other side, and the entire thing would be LITTERED with shrapnel.

A marginal intercept is unlikely; you'd need the missile itself to fail in some way; airliners are, unfortunately, effortless targets. Even then, it would have to miss by an absolutely humongous distance (probably larger than a proxy fuze could measure, so command-detonated by the launching system) to golden BB one single piece of shrapnel into a vital airplane bit.

There are a nigh-infinite number of ways anti-air engagements can go, but virtually none of them result in splashing the target without poking a telltale quantity/distribution/shape of holes in it.

[sudosysgen]

I'm not. The SM-2 has contact fuze capability in some models. Look it up. This was almost under active development at the time, as the SM-2 Block IV.

I'm not talking about therotically here. The SM-2 was at the time in a development program that involved direct hits.

A test warhead for direct hit capability is something that was tested for the SM-2 repeatedly, and was almost certainly being tested around the time this incident happened.

You would not expect any fragmentation in such test. Since hit to kill capability was under development at the time, and since test missiles often have dummy warhead, you could reasonably expect exactly what I said.

[sumofproducts]

Ahh, I'm so used to thinking of SM-2 IV as stone tablet-tier ancient history that it didn't even occur to me that there was a time when it was under development!

If you're talking low TRL dev shots where you dgaf about putting the real boom in since you're just measuring miss distance (presuming you're referring to the IVA's new steering/seeker/dorsals before uhh... 97 or whenever they shipped it?), that makes a great deal more sense.

I am still extremely skeptical that one could punch a missile that huge and that speedy through an airliner without it being blindingly obvious, but it certainly wouldn't have any standard frag bits flying around.