How Iran could have mistakenly shot down a 737 airliner:
Share to linkedin... [+]One of the basic tasks of an air defense battery is to discriminate between friend and foe. But amid a state of high alert after Iran had launched a barrage of ballistic missiles at U.S.
The SA-15 operators also would have considered the path and speed of the plane on radar. “Is it operating at low altitude, at high speed headed toward a sensitive area”? Deptula asks. Flight PS 752 was rising toward 8,000 feet at a speed of 275 knots when flight tracking data from its transponder cut out, a normal profile for an airliner, he says. “It is departing the area, climbing through medium altitude, not trying to hide its signature, looking like a routine operation.
The SA-15 has a relatively short range of 10 to 12 kilometers. At the speed the plane was going at, the soldiers may have only had a window of 10 to 20 seconds to decide whether to launch an interceptor, says Michael Elleman, senior fellow for missile defense at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It’s a very compressed window that the operator is working under,” he says.
Given the multiple means of detection and distinctive flight profile of an airliner, there’s no excuse for the deadly mistake, says Carlo Kopp, co-founder of the think tank Air Power Australia.
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