Agent 3 e-mail to chastise me for mentioning in my coda to yesterday's piece on the apparent shooting down of Ukrainian International Airlines flight PS752 by an Iranian missile, only the downing of Korean Airlines KAL007 by Soviet air forces. Agent 3 reminds me of two even worse "incidents", and possibly a third.
How quickly we forget [YOU forgot! Ed.] the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which crashed in July of 2017 near the border of Russia and Ukraine. The B777 -- a bigger plane than the B737-800 -- was supposedly flying at 10,000 metres (33,000 feet), at which altitude it could only have been hit by a large and sophisticated surface-to-air missile, probably the same Russian-built Tor-M1 missile system used by the Iranian military. See "Russian Missile System Suspected of Bringing Down Ukraine Airliner: Short Range, Fast and Deadly", Moscow Times, 10/1/20.
Who did that? The government of Vladimir Putin is keeping shtum, but the prime suspects were and remain the Ukrainian rebels, backed by Russia, trying to separate the eastern Ukraine from the motherland. Whoever did the dirty deed must surely have made a horrible mistake, firing on a civilian airliner. Right?
That tragedy was preceded, nine years earlier, by the shooting down of Iran Air flight IR655. On 3 July 1988 the Airbus A300 was en route from Tehran to Dubai when it was hit by an SM-2MR surface-to-air missile fired from... wait for it... USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser of the United States Navy. The aircraft was destroyed and all 290 pax and crew were killed.
The large jet was hit while flying over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, along the flight's usual route, shortly after departing Bandar Abbas International Airport, the flight's stopover location. The Vincennes had entered Iranian territory after one of its helicopters drew warning fire from Iranian speedboats operating within Iranian territorial limits. According to the American government, the Vincennes crew mistook the Airbus for an F-14 Tomcat, an American-made jet fighter that had been part of the Iranian Air Force inventory since the 1970s. Rather a glaring error.
The US Navy claimed the Vincennes made ten attempts to contact the aircraft on both military and civilian radio frequencies, but received no response. The Iranian government said the cruiser negligently shot down the aircraft, which was transmitting IFF squawks in Mode III, a signal that identified it as a civilian aircraft, and not Mode II as used by Iranian military aircraft.
The event generated a great deal of criticism of the Paranoid States of America, and particularly Vincennes captain William C. Rogers III, for "overly aggressive behaviour in a tense and dangerous environment." Walt expects to hear phrases like that a lot, in the aftermath of this week's tragedy. In the days immediately following the incident, President Ronald Reagan issued a written diplomatic note to the Iranian government, expressing deep regret. Walt expects a similar note to be issued by the mad mullahs of the Iranian government, any minute now.
To round out this list, let's not forget Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, a B777 which vanished into thin air... or deep water... five years ago this coming March, with 239 souls aboard, now presumed dead. The Malaysian government declared the loss an accident, but no-one has yet been able to say for sure what happened to the large airliner. I continue to believe that the plane was shot down by either Indian or (more likely) American forces operating from the US military base on Diego Suarez. That would have been an accident... of course.
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