Thread: Ukrainian airliner crashes near Tehran: Iranian media

More analysis from SOTT

It's 2am on January 8th 2020 and our guy is sitting in a Tor-M1 air-defense missile system about 10kms north-west of Imam Khomeini international airport, west of Tehran.

General Soleimani had been buried the day before, and in the last half-hour or so a couple dozen Iranian ballistic missiles had been fired from western Iran at two US bases in Iraq.

The entire Iranian military is on alert and stress levels are particularly high. There's been a lot of chatter about a likely US response to the Iranian missiles and our guy is one of several teams positioned around Tehran tasked with shooting down anything on his radar screen that fits the profile. But as the hours pass without incident, he starts to doubt he'll see any action - at least, not tonight.

By 6am the only thing he can report having seen on his radar screen are each of the 9 scheduled flights that departed the nearby airport that night. He watched them take normal flight paths off the northwest runway, climb into the clear night sky and then veer north or northeast. Since the Tor-M1 system he is operating is fitted with IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) functionality, he could even see their call signs. The second-to-last one was Qatar Airways Flight QR8408 heading for Hong Kong.

The last flight that night would be Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 heading for Kiev. It departed one hour late at 6.12am, but followed the exact same initial flight path as the previous flights. As it climbed and reached 4,600ft above ground level, the plane's transponder suddenly stopped working at about 6.14am, 2 minutes or so after take off. The plane then made a sharp right turn heading east and turning back around towards Tehran city, traveling another 15-20kms over 4 minutes before crashing into an area near a football field and exploding on impact.

For some as yet unknown reason, our guy had suddenly become convinced that the Boeing 737 was an 'enemy target'. As per protocol, he had requested authorization to launch, but his superiors could not be reached because of 'some problem with the communication network'. Again according to protocol, he had a 10-second window in which to decide whether to launch or not. Still convinced the 737 was a cruise missile or enemy aircraft, he launched the two missiles that sealed the fate of the 178 people on board.

The Iranian government and military has taken full responsibility for the shooting down of Flight 752, but no one has yet explained why a presumably well-trained missile system operator, having watched 9 commercial airliners fly past him that night, was so convinced that the 10th one was an enemy target that he made a decision - by himself - to shoot it down.

Originally Posted by Backspin

More analysis from SOTT
The Iranian government and military has taken full responsibility for the shooting down of Flight 752, but no one has yet explained why a presumably well-trained missile system operator, having watched 9 commercial airliners fly past him that night, was so convinced that the 10th one was an enemy target that he made a decision - by himself - to shoot it down.

Is there a link for this?
Where was the Iranian equivalent of Vasily Arkhipov, the Russian who didn't fire his missiles during a false positive when the Cuban missile crisis was near it's zenith.