Re: Malaysia Airlines place vanishes. : Wed Aug 06, 2014 12:29 pm
brearley84 wrote:
so what are the fighter jets expected to do if there was actullay a bomb on board the plane ? or a hijack
shoot it down over manchester city centre?
shoot it down over manchester city centre?
You are raising an horrific and almost unimaginable endgame, but yes, obviously people in charge of security of the UK will certainly have specific plans and contingencies if the worst came to pass.
What those would be, I obviously don't know but yes, one option is clearly to shoot the plane down. If it had been hijacked then that is one decision that someobody would ultimately have to make and I don't need to list the pros and cons of it here as if you think about it, they are obvious. The circumstances where the choice would be to shoot it down would be "hardly any" but you have the choice if you have fighter jets deployed, and you don't have the choice if you don't.
We had this discussion on here ad infinitum re 9/11. I think a fair summary is that if they had known in advance that the planes would definitely hit the twin towers, and if shooting down the plane was possible over water or relatively empty countryside, then it may have been done. But sadly the hijackers didn't file a flight plan and so one horrible consequence of shooting the plane down (amongst a million) is that you would by definition never ever know or be able to prove that it was the lesser of evils. Instantly a hundred conspiracists would lodge proof that the plane was only going to be detoured and land safely, as some protest, and the nasty government cynically killed its own people when there was no need.
It's analogous to when some unfortunate child meets a nasty end and then there are a hundred criticisms and recommendations so that it "will never happen again". But what is normally overlooked is that had the social workers and other agencies done all those things, there would by definition never be any proof that they had "saved that child's life". And they would probably be roundly criticised by many for (eg) taking the child into care, etc. The main difference is that the criticism for shooting down a plane and killing deliberately hundreds of civilians would be the mother of all shiitstorms.
If a plane is over a populated area then I wouldn't envy the person ultimately having to make those decisions but as I say, it is reasonable to have the option, even if you might almost never imagine circumstances where you would actually use it.