markonline1

What's even more sickening, is the video Sky are showing from one of the passengers in the cabin during boarding where you can see folk settling down for what should have been a routine flight. The poor bugger was a nervous flyer too by the message he posted along with the video. Sky also reporting from villages around the site that locals were saying it was raining bodies. Just horrible. At least everyone would have had little warning of what was happening.
On a side note, how unlucky for Malaysian. 2 major catastrophes in 6 months in an airline that was already badly struggling. This could be the nail in the coffin for them.

sir_eccles

Yeah, I'm never quite sure about those human interest stories. Do I need to know the bios of all the Brits on board? The BBC website had a whole story about several people who had lucky escapes by changing their tickets. One guy swapped shifts and ended being on board, his wife had swapped shifts and missed MH317.

Pulaski

High profile wrecks often lead to takeover or collapse. Panam (103) and TWA (800) spring to mind as names that disappeared soon after major crashes.

kimilseung

I bet a lot of their flying staff are looking for new jobs. Its got to spook even the sceptics.

Pulaski

Apparently there was a Ukrainian transport plane in the area. I can't help but wonder, after another Ukrainian transport plane was shot down a few days ago, if the Ukrainian plane might not have been shadowing MH17, using it as cover?

markonline1

I bet. I think I read Malaysian are offering refunds to anyone that doesn't want to fly in the next few weeks. Was also reading about a stewardess that swapped from the Malaysian that dissapeard. Her husband swapped onto the Malaysian that got shot down. Those sort of stories give me the spooks!!

Bluegrass Lass

Not that it matters now, but why were they even in that airspace? The FAA made Ukraine a no-fly zone for commercial craft. So why wouldn't European flights do the same thing?

civilservant

Uh no. There was a no-fly over Crimea, you can hardly declare the entirety of Ukraine out of bounds

kimilseung

My understanding is that it was assumed that weapons being used were not targeted at that height. Just like a safe distance on the ground is justified by the likelihood of a weapon reaching a certain distance, similar justifications are used for vertical distance.

Bluegrass Lass

I must have misunderstood the new story then... Apologies

GeoffM

No idea on this one but a Facebook post went mildly viral which allegedly showed the plane at the gate and a caption something like "If we get lost, this is what our plane looks like". The problem? Wrong plane. Lots of people trying to claim lots of crap.

You understood perfectly - I heard the same story. Crappy reporting by overeager journalists not bothering to check facts.

jmood

From my personal news-feed (edited a bit):

An unconfirmed number (around 100) of the world's leading HIV/AIDS researchers and activists were among the 298 people killed on a Malaysian passenger jet that was shot down over Ukraine, although the airline has not yet released names and figures.

The researchers were en route to the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia, set to begin Sunday.

The former president of the International AIDS Society Joep Lange, MD, a well-known HIV researcher from the Netherlands, was believed to be among the dead, along with his wife and collaborator Jacqueline van Tongeren.

Chris Beyrer, president-elect of the International AIDS Society, said if reports of Dr. Lange's death were true, "then the HIV/AIDS movement has truly lost a giant," the Associated Press reported.

Nobel laureate Dr. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, co-discoverer of the AIDS virus and president of the International AIDS Society, paid tribute to Dr. Lange in a speech in the Australian capital, Canberra.

Dr. Lange had been working on HIV since the earliest years of the epidemic, participating in clinical trials and research across the world, Dr. Barre-Sinoussi said.

"The cure for AIDS may have been on that plane. We just don't know. You can't just help but wonder about the kind of expertise on that plane," Trevor Stratton, an HIV consultant, told an Australian television station.

The conference is expected to be attended by 14,000 delegates from around the world. Former US President Bill Clinton and British activist/musician Sir Bob Geldof are to deliver speeches.

The World Health Organization's Geneva-based spokesman Glenn Thomas, who was en route to the conference, was also among the dead, said Christian Lindmeier, spokesman for the organization's Western Pacific region. "Everybody's devastated," Lindmeier said. "It's a real blow."

Some 35 million people live with HIV, although global AIDS-related deaths and new infections have fallen by more than a third in a decade, raising hopes of beating the killer disease by 2030, the United Nations said Wednesday.

sangreal

That was not the wrong plane. You can find the poster of that photo (Cornelis Schilder aka Cor Pan) on the passenger manifest released by Malaysia Airlines

Pulaski

"Hope" is about about all there is because to date there is no vaccine and there is no evidence that a single person has been cured of the disease. A case from a couple of years ago in the US, of a baby born to an HIV+ve mother who had been "cured" was retracted just a few weeks ago after the virus was discovered to have reestablished itself.

The only effective "hope" at the moment is to reduce infections, and then catch those who become infect early and keep them alive with an expensive cocktail of aggressive antiviral drugs. If that approach were implemented globally then the number of cases will start to drop around 2030 even without a true "cure" as those who have been treated with antivirals since the 1990's and 00's start to die of old age.

scrubbedexpat091

Plus 3 777 fatal accidents all within a 12 month period, granted not the planes fault here, just after so many years with no fatal accidents to its name, 3 have happened in a span of 12 months, and of the 5 hull losses, 3 of those were in the last 12 months.