his family, just to be cut away like that makes it all the more a tragedy, not forgetting the three beautiful children. the three beautiful children. 298 beautiful lives, no doubt, on that flight. matt, are you getting the answers that you want this morning about what went on in that sky over ukraine? well, i think it s such an unusual incident that no one really can make sense of it at the moment. certainly the news feeds we re getting in australia from our government very good and information is given and we re well informed here in australia. matt jones, thank you so much for being with us. again, we re deeply sorry for your loss and we send our best thoughts to you and your family.
across western and that s where the tragedy took place. why was it taking that route? it had on different days taken different routes. on that day for various reasons whether it was taken a northern route. if this flight plane was entirely planned in advance, this wasn t made up at the moment. it was the flight path of being on airway l980 that was the flight plane it had taken. closer analysis of that flight plan shows it was an open airway. the international organization you and i have talked about this many times they are the ones that decide which of the roadways of the sky you can fly and which ones you can t. what we know, of course, in this case it was entirely right that it was taken because it wasn t open pathway. so, kate, the question really is
later in the show. maciaela is on assignment and we re following two stories. wolf blitzer is on the ground in israel as they launch a ground offensive. the military trying to close off tunnels. we ll get back to wolf in just a second. he ll cover all of that for us. but, first, we must begin with the stunning realization according to a senior u.s. official that it was a missile that brought down flight 17 over a rebel-controlled part of eastern ukraine. 298 people were on that flight when it was shot from the sky. most of the passengers have been identified. none so far are american. ukrainian officials now calling for justice. they accuse pro-russian separatists of shooting down the plane. but russian president vladimir putin is pointing his finger at ukraine, blaming its military campaign against the separatists. this disaster may only inflame
the remains of the humans. you say that s the single most important thing. the one thing we do not know if it will happen at all at this point. often the easiest and fastest thing that happens. not often does any kind of this tragedy happen in such a disputed area. we have seen pictures of this area. we have seen pictures of the wreckage right now. and it does seem like we will get more evidence from military analysis and intelligence of what actually happened to this flight. so, do you need the black boxes? what would the black boxes then tell you that we won t be able to find out on our own? in this case with the wreckage and all the information out there included with the intercepted phone calls, the black box is pinpointed down and a tell tale way they will sound. if it s an explosion mid-air they will stop recording and any chance at all anyone tried to ascertain this is civilian flight on the cockpit voice
you can say some of the seprists may have had military training prior to this, we don t know this or provided by the russians or, worse-case scenario, you have a russian crew using this equipment. the fact that they ve taken this equipment out of there tells me that there s something in that system that they don t want us to see. a signature they don t want us to know much about. i want to get over to richard quest. we heard from the ground those eyewitnesses there. they keep talking about the area, the farmland and there is nothing there, small ukrainian town and also how massive the debris field is. what do we know? if you look at the debris field, you get an idea of what we re looking at. this is the thing you would expect to see from an aircraft that was fully fuelled for a long flight say from europe to southeast asia. complete and other destruction. but the experts will certainly be able to get within that. they will be able to recognize