As with most shooting, it is the thought and skill that goes into what happens before you press the button or pull the trigger that makes or breaks you. Shooting a missile like the one that brought down flight MH17 is no exception. Oops…?

The weapon in question is the SA-11, a radar-guided surface to air missile (SAM) system. It’s been around since the Soviets deployed the first-generation model in 1979. The mobile system (it sits on a tank chassis) is made to serve near the front lines to protect ground forces from air attacks. Operated by a crew of four and designed to attack fighter jets, it can fire multiple missiles simultaneously. It fires high explosive proximity fuse warheads, which home in on their targets and detonate just before reaching them, to maximize damage. Targets 20 miles away and over 70,000 feet in the air are fair game. It’s a “big, heavy vehicle that has big missiles,” says Randal Cordes, a military intelligence analyst who has worked at the CIA and Pentagon. “To use an SA-11 against an airliner, it’s brutal overkill.”

The training required to properly operate the system can take weeks or months, which may explain why the Malaysia plane was destroyed in the first place. The problem with the SA-11 is that it’s difficult to properly identify and track targets, but easy to fire missiles. “The skill comes in knowing what you want to shoot at,” says Cordes. That’s because the SA-11’s radar system shows the same “blip” for all different targets. The operator sees an aircraft’s altitude, air speed, and vector, but not it’s size or type, says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

What this all means is that in spite of emitting the correct signal for a commercial jet, the untrained militia who are presumed to have fired the missile were not skilled enough to know what they were shooting at, and so were basically just shooting blindly at whatever appeared on their radar.

298 people died because an under-trained team got a bit trigger happy.

Horrific.

More details on the weapon and training required to properly operate it at Wired.