[dragonwriter]

> Intentional or not, there have been, at most, three passenger jets hit by anti-aircraft missiles in the last thirty years.

At most 3 is incorrect.

Not counting MH17, there are at least four civilian passenger aircraft that were definitively shot down by missiles, and more that were suspected to be (or were definitively shot down, but where I can't find definitive information on the "by missiles" part) in the last 30 years:

LN 602 (March 23, 2007): attributed to the Tamil Tigers using Manpad missiles

Siberia Airlines 1812 (October 4, 2001): admitted shot down by Ukrainian military

Two Transair Georgia flights (September 21-22, 1993): shot down by missiles fired by rebels

Iran Air 655 (July 3, 1988): shot down by the USS Vincennes

Air Malawi 7Q-YMB (November 6, 1987): shot down by Mozambique (can't find anything one way or the other about whether this was "by anti-aircraft missiles" rather than, say, guns, so maybe not technically within scope.)

[tigerente]

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerolinee_Itavia_Flight_870, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Rhodesia_Flight_RH825, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Rhodesia_Flight_RH827, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_902, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Arab_Airlines_Flight_114, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_3, T&G Aviation DC-7 and more shot down by fighter aircraft.

There are far more than a dozen incidents in the past decades.

[dragonwriter]

Those (and KAL 007) are all outside of the thirty year window, but within a 40-year window. But, yes, there are lots of past incidents.

[astrodust]

That's a good list. I was only thinking of the Tamil, Iran and Malawi incidents.