Australian honeymooners Simone La Posta and her husband Juan Jovel will be eternally grateful they chose to fly Malaysia Airlines MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur a day earlier than scheduled because they didn't want to be too jetlagged for work on Monday.
If they had taken MH17 on Thursday, they would have been dead now. And in what should send a chill down Indian spines, it turns out that an Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner (registration VT-ANB) flying from Amritsar to Delhi and then to Birmingham in the UK was just around 25 kms away from the ill-fated Malaysian Boeing 777-200.
According to another aviation website Flightstats.com, the Air India 787 departed the gate at Delhi at 1:34 PM yesterday, a minute before scheduled time and landed in Birmingham 3 minutes before schedule at 5:57 PM GMT.
A file photo of the crash site. ReutersA file photo of the crash site. Reuters
A Singapore Airlines Boeing 777-200 (the same type of aircraft as the downed Malaysian one) flying from Copenhagen in Denmark to Singapore was also in the vicinity of MH17 and would actually have been at almost the same altitude as MH17 because it was on the same route heading eastwards.
The Air India 787 which was flying westwards was a full 7,000 feet higher at 40,000 feet at the Ukraine-Russia border because aircraft flying in opposite directions maintain different levels to avoid the danger of the mid-air collisions. In aviation terms when an aircraft is travelling at a speed of around 900+ kms an hour, 25 kms is almost nothing and it does seem like it would have been sheer chance that the trigger happy shooter shot down MH17.
See the full flight track of AI 113 yesterday here.
However, the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation in a release issued earlier today claims there was no Air India flight near the ill-fated Malaysian plane at the time of the incident.
Do we trust the Ministry of Civil Aviation or do we trust Flightradar24, a real-time flight tracking service that provides live information about thousands of aircraft around the world at any given point of time and from which you can also replay your flight's path from a day or two ago?
Indian bureaucrats will not like it, but the source to be trusted here is Flightradar24, because ADS-B transponder data does not lie and neither does multilateration (MLAT). Flightradar24 has a network of 3,000 plus ADS-B receivers around the world. The service is also helped by 4,000 plus aviation enthusiasts with ADS-B receivers who feed data to Flightradar24's network.
18/07/124 Ivor Soans/First Post
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If they had taken MH17 on Thursday, they would have been dead now. And in what should send a chill down Indian spines, it turns out that an Air India Boeing 787 Dreamliner (registration VT-ANB) flying from Amritsar to Delhi and then to Birmingham in the UK was just around 25 kms away from the ill-fated Malaysian Boeing 777-200.
According to another aviation website Flightstats.com, the Air India 787 departed the gate at Delhi at 1:34 PM yesterday, a minute before scheduled time and landed in Birmingham 3 minutes before schedule at 5:57 PM GMT.
A file photo of the crash site. ReutersA file photo of the crash site. Reuters
A Singapore Airlines Boeing 777-200 (the same type of aircraft as the downed Malaysian one) flying from Copenhagen in Denmark to Singapore was also in the vicinity of MH17 and would actually have been at almost the same altitude as MH17 because it was on the same route heading eastwards.
The Air India 787 which was flying westwards was a full 7,000 feet higher at 40,000 feet at the Ukraine-Russia border because aircraft flying in opposite directions maintain different levels to avoid the danger of the mid-air collisions. In aviation terms when an aircraft is travelling at a speed of around 900+ kms an hour, 25 kms is almost nothing and it does seem like it would have been sheer chance that the trigger happy shooter shot down MH17.
See the full flight track of AI 113 yesterday here.
However, the Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation in a release issued earlier today claims there was no Air India flight near the ill-fated Malaysian plane at the time of the incident.
Do we trust the Ministry of Civil Aviation or do we trust Flightradar24, a real-time flight tracking service that provides live information about thousands of aircraft around the world at any given point of time and from which you can also replay your flight's path from a day or two ago?
Indian bureaucrats will not like it, but the source to be trusted here is Flightradar24, because ADS-B transponder data does not lie and neither does multilateration (MLAT). Flightradar24 has a network of 3,000 plus ADS-B receivers around the world. The service is also helped by 4,000 plus aviation enthusiasts with ADS-B receivers who feed data to Flightradar24's network.
18/07/124 Ivor Soans/First Post
