'Highly likely' Iran shot down Ukrainian airliner that killed 176 people, U.S. officials say — and probably an accident

I’m sure there’s a good joke in there, but I don’t feel like digging for it.

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Wait, we aren’t blaming this on Boeing and a culture of crappy software? I thought that was where we were jumping in the other thread.

Maybe not but consider this. The SSR or mode-s transponder on that Boeing was intended to transmit signals to an interrogating transmitter, usually a radar. If that system was optimized to send a stronger signal to the interrogator, it would broadcast a weaker signal to the missile system, possibly leading to a problem with identification.

You are right, except that was a completely different event, it wasn’t blaming but a well-sourced, factual analysis, and it wasn’t crappy software so much as crappy management and a questionable safety culture.

Or maybe the phone owner frequently has his phone out for other purposes? Being a boomer, I don’t get it, but I see people who can’t function without a phone in their face. And are more adept than I at quickly switching to camera recording mode.

Phone guy had gone out for a smoke (you can see the smoke in part of the video). The US reported two rockets but we only see one. So phone guy heard the first explosion and got his camera running ASAP.

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Presumably there’s established protocol for investigative cooperation of international flight crashes, as this is far from the first flight to crash outside the borders of an airline’s home country. Iran seems to be cooperating with Ukraine.

There is. If a crash takes place within a country which signed the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation (such as Iran), that country is required to conduct the investigation- though they can delegate this to another country. For instance, after MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, the Ukrainians delegated the investigation to the Dutch authorities as 2/3 of the victims were Dutch, including a senator and his family.

The State of Registry, State of the Operator (both Ukraine), State of Design, and State of Manufacture (both the USA) have a right to appoint a representative to take part in the investigation, and are required to if the state conducting the investigation asks them to. But Iran is in charge of the investigation, until and unless they decide not to be.

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I find it ironic that such care is taken to move a box that has been designed to withstand violent crashes.

It’s not like USPS is involved.

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So that makes experts from 2 outside countries being invited over to investigate the crash. Not much of a cover up on Iran’s end there.

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Still ironic if the box was damaged in the crash?

You’d imagine that if they had shot it down by mistake they would have come up with a story about provocation from a US drone, that it was a terrorist attack or something like that by now. Anything to make them look less culpable.

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Inviting crash experts of the US government would be even more puzzling under such conditions!

Nothing about Iran’s actions here signal the kind of cover up one would expect of an autocratic nation that did something deadly and accidental.

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Maybe I’m missing something, but after watching the video a dozen times over two days, at the very start of the video I see what appears to my completely untrained eye to be a single missile intercepting something the camera’s sensor can’t pick up with the ground lights (but maybe the person holding it can see it?), a bright explosion and then a brief trail of flame dying out going roughly the other direction across the sky. If the person filming recorded a second missile, I can’t make it out.

Of course I’m keeping in mind that I still haven’t heard whether the video is even confirmed as of the event in question, and I lack the expertise to make an educated guess as to whether what I see in the video is actually a missile hitting a slower airborne object, or something else entirely.

At this point I have more questions than answers. YMMV.

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Right? Some people seem to be rushing to pounce on any little bit of evidence as confirmation of this narrative. It’s funny how all of a sudden, everyone is an expert on spotting missiles on shaking cell phones… :thinking: Because at this point, nothing is confirmed and people taking the “of course Iran shot down this plane” narrative at face value are likely just looking to have their bias confirmed. They could very well have done, but it could all be bullshit and the plane did go down with mechanical error. The truth is that we just don’t know…

We DO know that Iran does not have nuclear weapons (as some have asserted) and that this is an ongoing set of events that might be related or might not (meaning the plane and the tensions over Soleimani…).

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It’s also notable that Iran and Ukraine are being the adults in the room. As you said earlier, they have no reason to trust the motives or the competence of the assassins in the White House. I don’t know what transpired to bring down that airliner, but have the least confidence in the US response so far.

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Yeah, agreed. In addition to the usual empire bullshit our government claims when it comes to Iran, there is the added layer of the unbelievable incompetence of this administration. They have a massive burden of proof here…

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The American will need a visa.

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Um… “Iran invites NTSB to help with crash investigation”.

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Launchers have IFF interrogators. The missiles dont. Once launched, the missile doesnt care about IFF.

The missile operator has the option to ignore IFF anyway, if they’re in a RED FREE status (if it flies, it dies).

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Reuters reporting on a different plane crash: