[sidww2]

While it's nice to think that airlines can just rely on regulators to tell them which flight paths might be unsafe, the reality is that there's no international regulatory agency governing acceptable flight paths. There's a regulatory agency for every country and while one country might have stringent safety measures, another might not.

In such an environment it seems naive for an airlines to not include the safety of the flight path in their calculations. If all civilian flights below 32K feet are forbidden by the Ukrainian authorities, that doesn't automatically mean that flying just 1000 feet above would be safe. Also while other airlines are guilty of flying over war zones too, that doesn't mean Malaysian airlines is not.

[tommi]

https://www.eurocontrol.int

There is Eurocontrol which apparently hadn't advised before the incident to avoid the airspace in question.

[konstruktor]

It doesn't follow automatically, but given the specific limit, one would assume that it was deliberately chosen and includes an error margin. There's nothing wrong with flying at their assigned altitude, which was above the limit.

In aviation, you have to manage risks, you cannot avoid them entirely. For example, there are different levels of redundancy, depending on how critical a system is. There may be two, three or maybe four units, but there surely aren't 25 units of even the most critical equipment - the plane would be too heavy to take off. At some point, you have to decide what the acceptable risk is, and go with that. I think your argument has a strong hindsight bias.

[ig1]

The original flight plan was 35,000 feet. They dropped to 33,000 feet at request of ATC.

[jrockway]

> there's no international regulatory agency governing acceptable flight paths

I believe the ICAO is this regulatory agency.

[sidww2]

But with no legal power of enforcement I'm guessing? I mean an airlines can always choose to follow the directives of agencies from other countries that have more stringent standards.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there should be definitely increased public pressure on airlines to include flight safety in their calculations. Or atleast not fly over active war zones..

[jrockway]

The threat model was such that they thought the missiles in that region couldn't hit targets above 32,000 ft. MH17 was flying at 33,000 ft.

All rules bodies can do is make rules based on the best available information. Their information was wrong, but it's not like they didn't try.