The problem is that we still don't know for sure exactly what brought down the plane. Reading various news articles, it seems that whoever decides closure of th

The problem is that we still don't know for sure exactly what brought down the plane. Reading various news articles, it seems that whoever decides closure of the airspace for commercial flight was betting that the longer range anti-aircraft systems would not be used in the area. Historic data seemed to support this with planes being downed either via shoulder-fired missiles or some sort of gunfire, neither of which has the range to go to the cruising altitude of a passenger liner. This bet turned out to be bad, very bad. I don't know of the economics involved, but I'm guessing that, aside from political reasons, the different flight paths avoiding this would have cost the airlines enough to where they didn't want to do it. Which is pretty disturbing... The again, you don't need war to have air defenses shot down a civilian passenger jet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812