commercial airliner out of the sky? cnn's tom foreman has that for you. >> reporter: to figure out, don, what sort of system was used for this, you have to think about where the plane was at the time. they had been making this flight over ukraine. it was at about 32, 33,000 feet at the moment that it seemed to have failed and go to ground, about 30 miles from the russian border. so what could reach it up here? not a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile of any sort. you're going to need something much more robust, something like this. this is the buk anti-missile system. it's operated by four people. it has four ready to launch missiles. it can move very quickly. it can fire very quickly. and then it can move on. and these missiles have a tremendous amount of power. let's bring one down here and talk about what it's capable of doing. a buk missile, one of the missiles fired off a unit like this is about 16 feet long. so we have made it a little smaller here just to get it into the picture. it weighs about 1500 pounds.