Malaysia Airlines Shot Down

From LA Times and other sources:

Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down by a missle Thursday over separatist-controlled eastern Ukraine, apparently killing all 298 people on board and dramatically raising stakes in the conflict with the Kremlin-backed forces.

U.S. intelligence sources said tracking data from spy satellites and radar confirmed that the Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was hit in midair, but they couldn't immediately determine where the missile was launched.

Ukrainian officials said that Russia had recently supplied the separatists with the mobile Buk surface-to-air launching system, and that the military had not fired any antiaircraft missiles during the conflict with the separatists, which began in mid-April. A number of Ukrainian military aircraft have been shot down by the separatists.

Malaysia Airlines said it lost contact with Flight 17, carrying 283 passengers and 15 crew members, after the aircraft failed to confirm its entry into Russian airspace on schedule at 5:20 p.m. The last contact was recorded about 4:20 p.m. by air traffic controllers.

The plane “disappeared from radar at [33,000 feet] and then crashed near the city of Shakhtersk in Ukraine's Donetsk region,” the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

Standard analysis

A map on NPR blog indicates the crash was at 2:15 pm GMT, and the GCP event was set for 14:00 to 20:00 GMT to include a few minutes before that time and 6 hours for news to spread. The result is Chisquare 21549.384 on 21600 for p = 0.595 and Z = -0.241.

Standard Caveat: It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every “success” might be largely driven by chance, and every “null” might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.