The shrapnel damage is pretty much established as there are multiple videos from inside the plane during this flight prior to the crash and you can see shrapnel damage on the fuselage. The survivors are also confirming it, and report that there was a bang(which might be confused for bird strike).
The question is, who shot the plane? This part is pure speculation at this point.
> The question is, who shot the plane? This part is pure speculation at this point.
It doesn't seem to be too difficult to put together what is likely. Grozny was under active drone attack at the time with air defenses working. And Russian air defense crews are pretty infamous for the jumpy trigger fingers at this point.
And notably, the "drones" were civilian propeller aircraft fitted out to fly an unmanned suicide trajectory. I'm not sure they would even look all that distinguishable on a SAM operator's screen from a small jet like this.
The Airliner has a transponder and a radio. Pretty sure the drone does not.
The transponder code, assigned by various ATC would identify that aircraft as a civilian airliner when it checks in, and on the screens of the SAM operators.
Also, the speed and altitude of the airliner, even approaching Grozny would not be the same as a drone. Airliners, even on approach, are somewhat faster, probably 200-250mph, or faster, and much higher in altitude, at least 5000ft, probably more like 10,000ft until close to the airport.
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't a hostile power also put a transponder on their drone (maybe one even replaying a nearby plane's code)? Surely that could help it blend in and avoid defenses
More importantly, it's not uncommon when crossing Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC) regions (eg. from Washington Center, to NY Center) for controllers to instruct pilots to change Squawk codes. Same applies when crossing from one country's airspace to another.
One of these drones, without a bunch of extra avionics would be unable to change transponder codes in flight, and talk with controllers via relay, that would probably double the cost of the drone, or at least significantly increase it.
So even doing something creative, like spoofing the transponder Squawk code, from another aircraft, probably wouldn't help.
Also, with Mode-C, and Mode-S transponders, the later used with ADS-B, which feeds all the flight tracking websites, the transponder transmits altitude.
A SAM operator will figure out somewhat quickly if an airliner is supposed to be at 10,000ft and 250mph but isn't according to primary radar tracking, but much lower and slower, that it's spoofing it's transponder.
A regional jet on approach and a prop aircraft in cruise don't necessarily look that different in ground speeds, altitudes, or even radar cross section to most radars.
These "drones" are more like enclosed ultralights, heavily loaded, 50-80mph, which an airliner would have already stalled at and be dropping out of the sky.
It's one of the reason Russia was very hesitant to shoot them down initially. Some of the planes were cessna and similar single engine prop planes that were loaded with explosives and remote controller:
My brother is flying to Japan tomorrow and we were talking about how the flight has gotten longer because of all the active war zones that they can't fly over any more.
Itavia 870 comes to mind: In the 80ies, a fighter jet was being smuggled to Gaddafi by hiding under a civilian aircraft, and the speculation is that France shot the convoy, killing 81. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itavia_Flight_870
That’s what I understood from a documentary, I think it was from Al Jeezira, a civilian was pointing that there was a double radar echo from the plane and it meant there were probably two planes on top of each other.
Sure the article mention a theory that Gaddafi was in a fighter jet, and the civilian plane was a collateral damage from a dogfight, but given the lack of information in the public space, both theories still have a lot of common points.
The aircraft was sent away / prohibited from landing after reporting the explosion over Grozny, and had to divert to Kazakhstan to land without real pitch control.
The pilots probably should have ignored that. There’s no such thing as “denying landing clearance” to an aircraft experiencing an emergency. There’s only “get out of the way of the incoming emergency.” But I can’t blame them for not wanting to take their chances when they were just shot by local air defense.
The more obvious explanation would be that air controllers surmised that it was at risk of being shot at again if it continued attempting a landing in Grozny and the safest thing to do was to divert it out of Russia.
Regional air traffic control is in Rostov (on-Don) - you’d think they’d at least be able to get the military controllers at Rostov (Southern military district HQ) on the horn?
In particular some of the damage has a "linear" quality that could plausibly come from a continuous rod warhead, which would be typical for a system like Pantsir. If as the Russians claim, it was a bird-strike, you wouldn't expect debris from the failure of the engine to make a pattern like that on the tail, unless the entire engine body broke apart.
Likewise, it didn't look like it was on a glide path, but rather that as discussed the hydraulics failed and they has to use thrust vectoring to fly. Obviously for very fine correction on final approach that becomes difficult, and the result was what we saw. All of that is consistent with a missile.
The question is, who shot the plane? This part is pure speculation at this point.