mh17 Archives - Google Earth Blog

Back in July, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. We showed you some Digital Globe imagery of the crash site, which has since, in addition to other images, been added to Google Earth’s historical imagery.

It is generally believed that flight MH17 was shot down by pro-Russian separatists using a surface-to-air missile, but Russia has put the blame on the Ukrainian government. Official investigations into the crash have not yet made any findings as to who is responsible.

Last Friday, November 14th, 2014, Russian state television aired a story in which they showed satellite imagery purported to be of Flight MH17 being shot down by a fighter jet. However, it seems pretty clear that the image in question was a poorly done fake. For the full story and analysis of the imagery see the the article on bellingcat here.

We have created an image overlay of the photo for you to view in Google Earth which you can download here.

The picture that supposedly shows a fighter jet shooting down flight MH17. A high resolution version can be found here.

Last week, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine by a surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people on board. While blame is still being passed around for the crash, there are some places using Google Earth to try to better understand what happened.

First is the photo below, found via Twitter, which is using Google Earth to show the path of the flight, the path of the missile, and the crash site. At this point I’ve not been able to find a KML file for this image, but the image itself is rather striking:

Next is a series of images of the crash site, provided by DigitalGlobe. As they often do after a major news event, DigitalGlobe was able to capture imagery of the crash site to help document it from the air. They were unable to capture imagery on July 17 due to cloud cover, but have some from a few days around it.

They’ve also released two KML files to show some of the imagery:

That info comes to us from Amy Svitak at Aviation Week, who has a full article with more photos that is worth checking out.

mh17

Fake photo of MH17 being shot down

Tracking Flight MH17 in Google Earth