It is hard to imagine that they would deliberately target a foreign airliner, and a more likely explanation is that they mistakenly believed it was a Ukrainian military transport plane.
The unfair competition, while good for Boeing, has been bad for airlines such as Delta, which was forced to stop a popular international route because it could not compete with a foreign airliner receiving Ex-Im subsidies.
Critics have called the agency "Boeing's Bank" because of the large amount of aid received by foreign buyers of its airliners.
Even after the reported shooting down of the Malaysian airliner, Europe's foreign ministers struggled to convince.
Americans still struggling to comprehend how foreign terrorists could simultaneously hijack four airliners and turn them into missiles to bomb Washington and New York would surely differ.
Piston-engine airliners made weekend ski trips and foreign excursions possible for thousands of middle-income individuals who could finally fit a 10-day European holiday into the time frame and budget of their annual vacation.
Senussi's most notorious foreign exploit was masterminding the bombing of a French airliner over Niger in 1989 in which 170 people were killed.
(Reuters) MIDDLE EAST IRAQ: GETTING JETS BACK Jordan and Tunisia have agreed to hand back Iraqi civilian airliners impounded since the Persian Gulf war, Iraq's foreign minister was quoted as saying.
But the White House has not yet agreed to the background check procedures, and the Justice Department, meanwhile, is refusing to let most foreign students or pilots train to fly business jets or airliners.
Last July, when Russian-backed rebels in south-eastern Ukraine shot down a civil airliner carrying 298 people, including almost 200 Dutch citizens, Mr Timmermans, as foreign minister, made an impassioned speech in the UN Security Council urging the return of the victims' remains.
