Jeralyn: "Why was Malaysian Airlines flying a commercial aircraft over this conflicted region? Why didn't it take another route, especially since there were warnings?"

... around the world is duly routed through designated air transit corridors at pre-assigned altitudes, to minimize the chances for mid-air collisions. In North America, a typical 24-hour period of air traffic will look something like THIS. You can clearly see how the air corridor system works, from trans-Pacific routes to / from Hawaii and Alaska in the west, to the trans-Atlantic corridors to / from Europe in the east.

Airlines and their pilots often have very little choice or control over which corridor their aircraft is to be routed on any given day. MH17 was routed over Ukraine by Eurocontrol, which coordinates and controls all the air traffic throughout the entire continent. The only countries that are not members of Eurocontrol are Iceland, Estonia, Russia, Belarus and Azerbaijan. If there were warnings issued by pro-Russian seperatists, the pilots and Malaysia Airlines were likely unaware of any potential risks if they were not informed of such by Eurocontrol.

In the United States, the air corridor system was adopted following a June 1956 air tragedy, in which a United Airlines DC-7 en route from LAX to Chicago Midway Airport collided over the Grand Canyon with a TWA L-1049 Constellation headed from LAX to Kansas City. Two different air traffic controllers assigned the same altitude and heading to the two aircraft, each unaware of their respective proximity to one another.

128 passengers and crew died in that collision, which marked the deadliest commercial airline accident in U.S. history. That toll wasn't exceeded until a 1978 crash of a PSA 727 in the North Park area of San Diego, after it collided with a small private aircraft while on final approach to Lindbergh Field, killing 142 persons (135 onboard the aircraft, and 7 on the ground in North Park).

The Grand Canyon accident exposed the relatively primitive and haphazard nature of air traffic control as it existed at the time, which had heretofore been mostly left to the airlines and individual airports. It led to the an extensive and coordinated overhaul of the air traffic control system throughout the entire United States, which has improved immeasurably over subsequent decades with the advent of increasingly sophisticated ATC technology.

INTERNET TOY: If you have a friend or relative who is flying today, and would like to track their flight while it is progress, you can do so here at FlightAware.com, simply by entering the airline and the flight number. If you don't know the exact flight number but know the airline and approximate departure / arrival time, you can enter the respective airports of departure and arrival, and then identify the flight from a list provided to you.

If the plane is en route, the aircraft's GPS will pinpoint on a map exactly where it is, including altitude. If it has yet to depart, it will show the projected route assigned to it by ATC. If it's already landed, it will show the route that it flew. This is a great tool to use if you have to pick someone up at the airport, and want to check if their flight's on time. It sure saves you a lot of aggravation from having to call the airline.

Only the one Brit paper is apparently reporting that....

And the "equipment" had to have come from Russia".

Jeez Louise! We have been arming both sides of everywhere for decades. I wonder whether anything anywhere hasn't been done with equipment that we have sold to anybody with a buck.

Let's have an investigation and find out who was responsible.

And, you know, what possessed the airline to permit its passenger plane to fly there in the first place. Why take the slightest chance?