Boeing 777-200ER in the context of Long haul

Alitalia - Società Aerea Italiana S.p.A., operating as Alitalia (Italian pronunciation: [aliˈtaːlja]), was an Italian airline which was once the flag carrier and largest airline of Italy. The company had its head office in Fiumicino, in the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital. The airline was owned by the Government of Italy as a nationalized business from its founding in 1946 until it was privatized in 2009. However, it struggled with profitability whilst operating as a private company, including failed negotiations to sell to other private parties. The airline entered extraordinary administration in 2017 following many years of financial losses. The Italian government eventually took back ownership of the airline in March 2020.

The airline operated a fleet of Airbus A319-100, Airbus A320-200, Airbus A321-100, Airbus A330-200, and Boeing 777-200ER aircraft to over 34 scheduled domestic, European and intercontinental destinations. The airline operated from its main hub at Leonardo da Vinci–Fiumicino Airport in Rome. The airline was a full member of the SkyTeam alliance, and it had codeshare agreements with 42 airlines. In 2018, the airline was the twelfth-largest airline in Europe.

The wingspan (or just span) of a bird or an airplane is the distance from one wingtip to the opposite wingtip. For example, the Boeing 777–200 has a wingspan of 60.93 metres (199 ft 11 in), and a wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) caught in 1965 had a wingspan of 3.63 metres (11 ft 11 in), the official record for a living bird.The term wingspan, more technically 'extent', is also used for other winged animals such as pterosaurs, bats, insects, etc., and other aircraft such as ornithopters.In humans, the term wingspan also refers to the arm span, which is the distance between the length from the end of an individual's arm (measured at the fingertips) to the individual's fingertips on the other arm when raised parallel to the ground at shoulder height.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down by Russian-backed forces with a Buk 9M38 surface-to-air missile on 17 July 2014, while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost when it was about 50 kilometres (31 mi; 27 nmi) from the Ukraine–Russia border, and wreckage from the aircraft landed near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km (25 mi; 22 nmi) from the border. The shoot-down occurred during the war in Donbas over territory controlled by Russian separatist forces in Ukraine.

The responsibility for investigation was delegated to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT), which in 2016 reported that the aircraft had been downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine. The JIT found that the Buk originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation and had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash, fired from a field in a rebel-controlled area, and that the launch system returned to Russia the following day.