I'm ashamed that when someone told me I thought "airshot"... this is fucking sick though it reminds me of 9/11, that fear of a massive war that i think a lot of people had. And the sense of disbelief... it's terrible for everyone involved, especially the dutch :(

It's pretty stupid that our news is saying things like '28 australians killed in plane explosion' how fucking narcissistic is this country
Our prime minister: "Russian-backed rebels have killed Australians... Australia takes a very dim view indeed" excuse me but people from other countries exist too this is sickening

People, I just want to remind you all, statistically flying is still the safest way to travel.
The only reason is that people think it is dangerous is because if something goes wrong a lot of people die at the same time.

statistically yes, we all realize the numbers don't lie and obviously plane crashes aren't as common as car accidents. but simply going by numbers is incredibly naive. because plane crashes still occur, and when it does happen your chance of survival vs a car accident is slim to none

"The trampling of justice and decency in the pursuit of national aggrandisement and reckless indifference to human life should have no place in our world," Mr Abbott said.

It's not like the networks are belittling the suffering of individuals or other nationals on board the plane... Any "national" news networks in the world would be broadcasting tragedies like this in exactly the same way. Broadcasting the loss of fellow citizens is hardly narcissistic, especially seeing as anywhere that you find those statistics they will appear next to the numbers of all other nationals on board.

This kind of tragedy is both distressing and disheartening, and my heart goes out to all of the families and friends of those 298 passengers and crew who unwittlingly became victims yesterday.

It just seems to me to be an extension of the absurd bias ('patriotism') shown by aus sports commentators. You are right, someone said above that the main danish news site is also doing the same thing -- but I do think focussing on Australians is silly. For example, the person who told me about the crash this morning quoted the number of Australians killed, and didn't even bother mentioning the hundreds of people from other nationalities who were also on that plane.

Anyway, I'm still kind of in shock so apologies for the loaded words I used in my above post. I'm not trying to pick a fight. This whole situation just sucks, especially for the families.

Requiescant in pace.

http://www.breakingnews.ie/world/aids-expert-killed-in-mh17-disaster-636753.html

'' The world of HIV and Aids research has been rocked by the Malaysia Airlines disaster which claimed the lives of more than 100 leading experts in the field. ''

What is happening to their country really sucks. Basically Russia wants the south and east part of their land. :s

Latest update:

4 unknown
189 Dutch
29 Malaysian
27 Australian
12 Indonesian
9 UK
4 German
4 Belgian
3 Philipines
1 Canada
1 New Zealanders

Just for comparison sake:

173 Dutch lives were lost yesterday, which is around 1 out of 100,000 of the population.
To put things in perspective, the American lives lost in 9/11 were around 1 out of 100,000 as well.

It's a very sad day for the world, we live in 2014, how can such things still happen.

Very chilling, I'm completely speechless. I don't know what's more shocking, events like these or the general public's lack of understanding of why events like these have been happening.

http://media.dumpert.nl/foto/bb6fe4b7_Yohjc.png

The plane itself, one of the passenger made this picture, the text under it: In case he dissapears, this is how he looks like.

Very bizarre.

Link's dead for me.

edit: opening in private browsing lets me see it, otherwise I get a nice 403 forbidden message

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/malaysia-airlines-crash-flight-recorder-found-as-anger-at-russia-mounts-live-updates

To me the worrying part of this is that at this point in time it seems that the flight was brought down by rebels. All instances of civilian planes being taken down in the past were military acts by national forces. That rebels somehow obtained the means to bring down a plane at cruising altitude is disturbing because this would mean that guarding the airspace directly around an airport is no longer enough to guarantee safe flight corridors.

It's also interesting to point out that when civilian jets have been brought down in the past, it was almost always(or even just always) a mistake as well; two examples:

• An American cruiser took down an Iranian jet in the past because they thought it was a missile coming at them due to its flight pattern on their target radar.
  
• A Russian fighter jet was looking for an American radar plane during the Cold War, but he mistakenly took down a Korean civilian jet(this was at night) which happened to be where they were expecting the scout plane to be. The flight had veered off course due to failing to set the correct heading mode on the auto-pilot.

So as you can see, while it is worrying that rebels have such weapons, military forces are known to make these mistakes as well(especially at times of war).

With vehicle travel you have some control or at least the illusion of control over situations. It's that feeling of complete helplessness with air travel that puts fear into people. When I'm driving I can treat every car as not seeing me and trying to kill me, and do other things to try and minimize my risk. With air travel you just have to sit back and hope that extremely unlikely dice roll never comes up, because it's completely out of your hands to influence the situation. That is a very unsettling feeling for a lot of people.

Couple things I saw while browsing this morning (I'll dig through my history and source if someone wants to read more):

1. Top 100 or so AIDS researchers were on the plane
2. Putin's plane was in the same area at the same time when this plane was shot down

Knew a girl that was on that plane, we went to highschool together. :(
Her entire family was on that plane exept for her sister, can't imagine what she's going through right now.. losing everyone like that

Not bizarre or creepy. Just a dark joke (MH370) and a coincidence.

that is absolutely horrible man... my condolences to her :/

Pretty sad that the majority of you guys found out about this over a forum.

but yeah,

russian is power hungry, obama won't do anything to stop other than sanctions and china is taking over parts of japan.

What concerns me is that the rebels got control of the crash site quickly and diverted the majority of the evidence to Russia, it'll make it very difficult if not impossible to get independent verification of what really happened.

un is a joke rofl

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtVVNxvCUAAPZzv.jpg