Watching the news reports about this, I want to ask a couple of things. If this was indeed a hijack and assuming that there are more people involved as ground support team, is it possible that the ranges that media outlets show are wrong? Or to say it another way, is it possible that with some support from people on the airfield (like forged documents or reports), the plane took off with more fuel than planed, up to it’s maximum capacity? If so, and if the numbers wikipedia gives about the plane are accurate, they could have flown almost everywhere in that hemisphere.

Sorry if I’m asking stupid questions but my knowledge in commercial aviation is rather limited and this is only my own little conspiracy theory, while drinking coffee and watching TV.

I find this debate lacking and very short sighted. Verymuch in line with US/UK media coverage..

I don’t know. We seem to have more recent developments.

U.S. intelligence indicates that a Turkish warplane shot down by Syrian forces was most likely hit by shore-based antiaircraft guns while it was inside Syrian airspace, American officials said, a finding in tune with Syria’s account and at odds with Turkey.

The whole article is a nice read too.

Hawx ace, either you are trying to convince Greeks about Turkish violations of our air-space or you have the wrong video linked :p

If Syria attacks Turkey and Turkey calls for Nato help then Greece may have no choice but to fight Syria for Turkey 🙂

Only if you manage to convince Merkel to pay our bills going to war. And then we’ll just stand aside and leave the Germans do the actual fighting. :p

I guess I didn’t read that sentence. I read the one saying that it went off their radar at 13nm, so I assumed that it could have gone at a lower altitude and not been seen from Turkish radars.

If the video above is true, why would Syrian AAA open fire on an aircraft that far away (would their fire-control radars even be able to lock on to a target that far away?), and onlookers at the beach would not have been able to see the engagement take place. All assuming the video shows what it claims to show.

There is a thin line in those statements. If the aircraft was shot down over international waters, then Turkey was attacked. If Turkey was attacked, then they can invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty. If on the other hand the plane went down in Syria airspace, then Turkey is the aggressor, even by accident. No Article 5, no NATO help.

Why Article 5 is important? Because it gives NATO the ability to strike back without an UN resolution and there is no need of security council approval. Hey world, the alliance was attacked and we simply strike back..

Some people here seem to believe that US foreign policy is behind this and I can’t blame them. My view is that Turkey is trying to drag NATO into this for it’s own reasons. It doesn’t matter really in my book.

So, lets go back at the AA gun. The general consensus from what I’ve read till now, is that the F-4 was shot down by gun. I don’t know if that video is true or not and it doesn’t matter really. No AA gun has 13nm range. There is no way a gun guidance system be that accurate at that distance. Tomorrow we may hear about a SAM downing that plane or about a mystery boat off the coast of Syria. But right now, that story has huge holes in it.

Well it doesn’t mean the plane was engaged at 13nm away. That’s just when it went off Turkish radar.

What part of this statement says anything close to that?

“According to our conclusions, our plane was shot down in international airspace, 13 nautical miles from Syria,” Mr Davutoglu told TRT television.

From here.

“According to our conclusions, our plane was shot down in international airspace, 13 nautical miles from Syria,” Mr Davutoglu told TRT television.

13 nm is a bit away. So we are talking about a SAM (or Mr. Davutoglu tells, how should I put it, not the whole truth maybe?).

They probably would need pretty large explosives and also drill a hole to crack the concentrate. And they need to do this many times to make the runway non-operational.
So this special operation team have to be large and have a lot of time.

Such a operation would be neither fast nor very covert. This would give any british military on the base plenty of time to attack.

What about mortar attack? Your purpose is to delay the scramble, not destroy the base. Let me give you another approach. A single sniper that kills your pilots on their way to the aircraft. How many pilots do you have at any time? Even if you find and eliminate him, are you sure that there isn’t another one to get your next pilot out. What about a mortar attack against the pilots living quarters? What are you going to do with your hi tech aircraft if there is no one left to fly them. With an air strike already on it’s way.

That is my main point. We are so locked up comparing the technical specs of weapon systems, that usually forget the problem as a whole. Yes, there is nothing in the area to take down the EF-2000, but there are other ways to disable it. The more we rest assure in our (technical?) superiority, the more vulnerable we become. And that applies not only in our little island scenario but in any operations theatre, even at home.