The Saturday morning crash of a Russian passenger plane in the Sinai Peninsula, killing 224 people, was immediately claimed by the local ISIS affiliate, though both Egypt and Russia immediately denied this, and analysts are similarly not putting much stock in the idea.
Though everyone seems to agree that Russia would be a “high-value target” for ISIS, the question of how such an attack would be carried out remains unanswered. ISIS almost certainly wouldn’t have the sort of anti-aircraft missiles to fit a plane flying at such an altitude.
ISIS insisted that they used “brains more than explosives” for the downing, however, which could suggest some sort of sabotage or even the planting of a bomb on board the plane before takeoff. So far there isn’t a formal explanation for how the plane broke apart in mid-air.
Until there is a good explanation, that means the ISIS claim of credit is at least possible, though previous incidents of ISIS claiming credit for things they clearly had nothing to do with, like the attack on a museum in Tunisia, has led most to assume they’re just making the claim in the hope somebody believes them.
Barring bad weather conditions there are two external causes for this downing and both begin with an m: missile and meteorite. The argument that Daesh in the Sinai does not have the capacity of downing this plane at cruise altitude is convincing to me. Hence, could it have been a hit by a meteorite?
The probability that a plane in flight is hit by a meteorite is small but not zero. Such a meteorite must have sufficient mass when it enters the atmosphere to survive mass loss on its trajectory to the plane and must have still sufficient velocity to penetrate through the plane's skin. I am not an expert hence I do not know what that mass must be for either an iron or a stony meteorite.
An additional problem for the meteorite hypothesis is that this object must probably have produced a luminous trail in our atmosphere. The Sinai is scantily populated but someone should probably have seen the trail. And then there is the military radar of Israel. Did it observe a trail? If not, why not?
Taken together a meteorite hit is still a low probability but cannot yet be definitely ruled out.
The airline is claiming that there was some "external influence" but that may be just because they suspect faulty maintenance on their part and are trying to explain it away in advance. French media claimed yesterday that the claim of responsibility definitely came from ISIS and was not a plant and that ISIS has never claimed an attack that it didn't carry out. The claim that it wasn't behind the Tunisia museum attack emanates from the Tunisian government and has neither been confirmed nor excluded. As we wll know, if it happened to suit Putin to blame this event on ISIS, we'd be told that their claim was absolutely true and that the Tunisian government had lied about the museum attack! That's the bright side of this tragedy: it clearly doesn't suit Putin one little bit!
Never say never.Either structural failure, a bomb or it was shot down,Pretty coincidental if it came down over Sinai,though.