CNN aviation expert: Russian plane crashed during safest part of flight, at cruising altitude
Hopefully they'll find the black box very quickly, since the crash took place over the land.
Reported accounts differ as to whether there was any distress call after take-off.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/opinions/russia-plane-crash-egypt-quest-analysis/index.html
London (CNN)The Russian aircraft that went down Saturday in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula crashed in what was the safest part of its flight from Sharm el-Sheikh to St. Petersburg, Russia.
The plane had been in the air for roughly 23 minutes; At this point, a plane is on autopilot. It's reaching its initial cruising altitude, and there is little that can or should go wrong.
If you look at statistics, most accidents happen on takeoff or landing -- far and away, most are on landing, more than 50%. A small proportion -- roughly 10% -- happen in the phase of flight known as the "cruise," which is where this plane was.
For something to happen at that point in the journey to bring down an aircraft is unusual.
If it hasn't been blown out of the sky by terrorist or military activity -- and there's no evidence of that in this case so far -- then it should be the safest part of the flight.
SNIP
http://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-passenger-jet-crashes-in-egypts-sinai-peninsula-1446281838
Egypt’s flagship state-run newspaper, Al Ahram, quoted an Egyptian aviation official as saying the plane’s pilot had requested to land at the nearest airport after an unspecified mechanical problem shortly after taking off at 5:50 a.m. local time. The newspaper later cited another Egyptian aviation official as saying the pilot hadn’t made any distress calls or requests to land.
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A surface-to-air missile system capable of hitting an airliner at cruising altitude is very large:
SA-2 Guideline (S-75 Dvina)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K11_Krug#/media/File:Sa-4.jpg
SA-4 Ganef (2K11 Krug)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2K12_Kub#/media/File:Sa6_1.jpg
SA-6 Gainful (2K12 Kub)
There's also the SA-10 Grumble and its variants, which are even larger.
You also need at least two phased-array radars: one to track the target, one to guide the missile to it. If you're too cheap or your system is too old to have phased-array radars (these use thousands of radar transceivers arranged in a grid pattern; by sweeping across the grid like your TV set sweeps across the screen you can make one radar do many jobs) you need a height-finder, a distance and azimuth finder, and a missile tracker at the very minimum...and a speed-sensing radar is a handy thing to have too. (The old MIM-65 HAWK missile system required five radars to work.)
The point of our story: Whatever we are calling the Terrorist Flavor of the Day wouldn't want a high-altitude SAM system. It's too big to hide, requires operators that need a LOT of training to effectively use the thing, and is way too expensive - as in "a whole division's worth of equipment or a single missile" expensive. Shooting at an airliner with an SA-7 or SA-14 shoulder-fired missile, or one of the Stingers we sold to the Mujahideen back during our 1980s proxy war against the Soviets, would be a waste of time because the missile would run out of fuel and fall out of the sky 9000 meters below the plane.
My suspicion is it'd be a lot cheaper, less detectable and just as effective (maybe MORE effective) to find someone wishing to martyr himself for the cause and slip him into the cargo hold with a pair of bolt cutters and the mission of cutting fuel pump wiring and hydraulic lines once the plane levels off.
