India, Jan. 15 -- All these shoot-downs of civilian jets by trigger-happy militaries around the world are fundamentally a political phenomenon, not a technical malfunction or mere human error
One of the main causes of death of airline passengers in recent decades is being shot down by somebody's military . Not the very biggest, of course: Accidents account for nine-tenths of all deaths in civilian airline crashes and terrorist attacks and hijackings cause most of the rest. But a solid 2.5 per cent of the deaths are due to trigger-happy people in military uniforms.
That's 1,379 passengers killed in commercial airliners that were shot down because they were off-course or simply mis-identified, out of a total of 57,767 deaths in all the "maj...