JERUSALEM. July 5 (Interfax-AVN) - It has not yet been certainly established what happened in Ukrainian airspace south of Dnipropetrovsk in the early hours of July 5 and whether the Israeli passenger Boeing 757 airliner belonging to the Israeli airline El Al could have been targeted for a missile attack or a pilot misidentified a flash on the ground as a mid-air explosion near the plane. The Israeli radio station The Seventh Channel on Friday morning reported, citing a pilot from the airliner en route from Tel Aviv to Moscow, that a surface-to-air missile was launched in the direction of the plane. According to the radio station, the incident happened south of Dnipropetrovsk in the small hours of Friday.
The pilot said he saw a flash on the right side of the plane after the launch. He immediately reported the incident to ground air traffic control services. The radio exchange has been saved by flight recorders.
The radio station said nobody was hurt in the incident and the plane was not damaged. The airliner later landed safely in Moscow. Sources with the Moscow office of the Israeli airline told Interfax that 168 seats were booked for this flight, and Russian citizens were among the passengers.
The plane landed at Moscow's Sheremetyevo-2 airport at 1:35 a.m. Moscow time on Friday, departed as early as at 2:35 a.m., and should have already landed in Israel, the Moscow office of El Al told Interfax.
The Israeli Embassy in Moscow has refrained from commenting on reports about the incident.
Kyiv in turn denied that a missile could have been launched at the plane. Spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry Kostyantyn Khivrenko on Friday told Interfax that Ukraine had not conducted any military exercises involving missile launches in the past several days,.
Khivrenko said he had not yet heard media reports that a pilot of an Israeli passenger airliner flying over Ukraine witnessed a mid-air explosion near the plane. The defense ministry spokesman reiterated that he can only say at the moment that no exercises were conducted.
A Ukrainian expert, former military pilot and instructor Oleksiy Melnyk, said in comments on this incident that he does not believe that the Israeli passenger airliner could have been targeted for a missile attack over Dnipropetrovsk. "If the plane was flying at an altitude of about 10,000 meters, which is normal for such flights, nobody could have launched a missile accidentally. Only the armed forces have such missiles at their disposal," he said.
Melnyk said he believes that the Israeli pilot could have been excessively watchful in the wake of air crashes that have happened of late, which, in combination with his tiredness, could have resulted in some optical illusions.
Such close attention to the incident in Ukrainian airspace is quite understandable after a tragedy that occurred over the Black Sea on October 4, 2001, when a Tupolev 154 plane of the Russian airline Sibir crashed into the sea. An investigation into the catastrophe established that the accident was caused by "an missile launched with an S-200 missile system." The missile was launched during military exercises of the Ukrainian air defense and air forces.
That catastrophe happened 185 kilometers southwest of the Russian resort of Sochi. There were 66 passengers, mostly Israeli citizens, and 12 crewmembers aboard the plane, and they all were killed.
Russia and Israel are continuing negotiations with Ukraine on timeframes and the size of compensation it has to pay to relatives of the crash victims.