Downing of Flight MH17 (2014)

Donbas, July 17, 2014: the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 operating Flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur is destroyed at 33,000 feet (FL330, about 10,100 meters) by a Buk surface-to-air missile. 283 passengers and 15 crew die, 196 of them Dutch. The Joint Investigation Team (JIT) established in 2016 that the launcher had come from Russia and gone back there, then in 2018 that it belonged to a Russian anti-aircraft brigade. In May 2025, the ICAO Council found Russia responsible for a breach of the Chicago Convention. For insurance, MH17 is the textbook AVN 48B case. The clause takes war, the hostile detonation of a weapon of war and malicious acts out of hull and liability policies. The hull therefore moves to the hull war policy, placed separately in the London aviation war risk market. Liability comes back into the main policy through the AVN 52 endorsement, which writes those perils back at full limit for passengers and under a sublimit for third parties on the ground. The Montreal Convention knows no war defense at the first tier: the carrier was liable without fault up to the cap, wherever the missile came from. Above it, the carrier could escape by proving the damage was caused solely by a third party. The case also shifted the conflict zone question onto the overflown states. Ukraine had closed its eastern airspace only below FL320, and the Dutch Safety Board pointed this out in 2015. EASA has since published conflict zone bulletins, which war underwriters read before quoting, and the market raised its rates on exposed routes. Not to be confused with the disappearance of MH370 four months earlier, where the lack of wreckage left the cause open.