With mounting evidence that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian separatist rebels who believed they were engaging a military aircraft, attention is focusing on the Russian-built Almaz-Antey Buk-M1 ground-based air defense system (GBADS) that destroyed the airliner.
The Buk-M1 (SA-11 Gadfly to NATO) can be used by minimally trained operators to deliver a lethal attack, without the safeguards built into other comparable GBADS, an Aviation Week analysis shows. It is also one of the two GBADS — both of Soviet origin — that are most widely distributed in conflict zones with the potential for large-scale, cross-border or civil violence.
The feature that makes the Buk-series weapons uniquely dangerous was introduced in the 1970s when Tikhomirov NIIP, now part of Almaz-Antey, designed the system to replace the 2K12 Kub low-altitude missile system, known to NATO as the SA-6 Gainful. (The similar names are coincidental: "Kub" means "cube" and "Buk" means "beech.")
Kub was exported to Egypt after the destruction of that nation’s air force in a low-level air strike in 1967, and proved lethal in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. But it had a serious weakness in that it could engage only one target at a time. A Kub battery included one radar vehicle and four launch vehicles and used semi-active radar homing (SARH) guidance. The radar vehicle carried two antennas, a search radar and a continuous-wave tracker-illuminator, and the missile homed on to energy from the illuminator beam that was reflected from the target. With one illuminator per battery, the system could not start a second engagement until the previous missile had hit the target.
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