how long does it take a surface to air missile to go from the ground to a fleeing passenger jet?/ part 2

how long does it take a surface to air missile to go from the ground to a fleeing  passenger jet?/ part 2

fiction
Edward w Pritchard


Maybe the only adult, the ranking officer in the four man group had had a fight with his wife and had been drinking. Not having a good day really. The decision to fire the new missile launcher recently acquired at a jet traveling at 33,000 feet fell on a couple of inexperienced young anarchists; out of work lads who needed a job and decided to enlist, not bad guys at all just with no experience in air traffic control or advanced missile systems. Couldn't tell a passenger jet full of civilians going on vacation jet's green bleep on a screen from their dreaded enemies soldiers traveling at 33,000 feet in a military transport vessel. Given the chance the soldiers wouldn't do it again and they will be sorry for a long time later for shooting civilians out of the sky.

So you are sitting in a passenger jet going from Amsterdam to Malaysia and you see a heat seeking missile coming at your plane. What's your move? Do you have time to forgive the lads playing soldier for shooting you down if you have military training and a quick mind and can deduce quickly the information above in paragraph one? Or do you think about your own children; maybe you had an argument with one of them before you left the airport? Or do you think about your luggage in the hold below your seat, it's Samsonite and expensive; will your luggage really be indestructible, like in the old television commercials?

It's too bad this writer isn't clairvoyant for real about artificial intelligence, thinking machines rapidly developing consciousness and the guided missile heading for the jet plane realizing what is about to happen and refusing to obey it's orders and programming and dropping to empty ground harmlessly rather than destroy 300 innocent persons who don't deserve too die like this. It's too bad too that there isn't a God who watches for such things, tragedies really and knows everything in advance and doesn't let things like a military missile locate, target and destroy three hundred unique individuals.

If you were sitting in a passenger jet about to be hit by a guided missile launched by a four man military crew that they really didn't understand how to properly operate, and they really never were educated to study ethics or the rules of civilized warfare to realize what was happening for real; if you were the passenger could you forgive the four man crew about to kill you? How about the geniuses who designed the weapon? Or the politicians in an un named Country who approved world class weaponry to be given to weekend soldiers trying to bring on Chaos? Bored with life type young soldiers but not bad chaps really. What about the factory workers somewhere or other who built and assembled the missile that killed 300 civilians, are they culpable?

Life is tragedy sometimes. No one's really to blame when horrible things happen. Everyone is just going about their business and sometimes bad things just happen. It's a shame really. 300 civilians die rather than have a nice vacation because someone decided to build a missile that is capable of knocking a jet fleeing at 400 miles an hour out of the skies over the Ukraine.