[dragonwriter]

> "This is something that never, never happens, and it's unlikely to happen again. "

> This wasn't an equipment failure or a natural disaster, so I don't really agree with this line of thinking.

And its simply, factually incorrect; military forces shooting down civilian airliners is not something that never, never happens, nor is it something that is unlikely to happen again. In fact, it seems to have happened more than once each decade for most of the history of civilian aviation (though there may have been only once incident in the 1990s).

EDIT: The one instance I had seen in the 1990s actually involved two planes of the same airline shot down by missiles by the same rebels on subsequent days, and a third hit while loading by mortar fire while loading on the ground on the next day. So, the 1990s aren't an exception to the "more than once per decade".

[diydsp]

2x in the 90s. 3.5x in the 2000s. 22x since the 1940s [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inci...