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The military also didn't go out of its way to punish recklessly shooting down a civilian aircraft. The guy should have been court martialed, but at the very le

The military also didn't go out of its way to punish recklessly shooting down a civilian aircraft. The guy should have been court martialed, but at the very least not given a medal

wtbob 10y ago
> The military also didn't go out of its way to punish recklessly shooting down a civilian aircraft. It wasn't reckless: it was the right call based on the data Vincennes had, which showed that an Iranian fighter was able to kill it.
- kwhitefoot 10y ago
  Only because no one went out with binoculars to take a look.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    The aircraft was 11 nautical miles away, which is over the horizon.
    - Someone 10y ago
      It's only over the horizon if the plane was flying below 200m or so (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Distance_to_the_horizon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Distance_to_the_horizo...) I can't find conclusive evidence, but I think that's unlikely, given that the planned cruising height was 4300m (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Shootdown_of_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Shootdown_...), and it was shot down about halfway through its flight. I'm not sure whether using binoculars at 20km distance makes sense, though. There's quite a size difference, but even if it would be easy to spot the difference from that far away having half a minute or so to find the plane using your binoculars would be challenging (it's about a minute of flight for a passenger plane, but if it were military, you would want to hit it before it had a chance to fire a missile, and according to Wikipedia, the Maverick that they feared an Iranian F14 might carry has a range of over 12 nautical miles)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > it was the right call based on the data Vincennes had, It was, at the most generous, the right call based on the misinterpretation of that data by the crew.

The military also didn't go out of its way to punish recklessly shooting down a civilian aircraft. The guy should have been court martialed, but at the very least not given a medal

wtbob 10y ago

> The military also didn't go out of its way to punish recklessly shooting down a civilian aircraft. It wasn't reckless: it was the right call based on the data Vincennes had, which showed that an Iranian fighter was able to kill it.

kwhitefoot 10y ago
Only because no one went out with binoculars to take a look.
- wtbob 10y ago
  The aircraft was 11 nautical miles away, which is over the horizon.
  - Someone 10y ago
    It's only over the horizon if the plane was flying below 200m or so (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Distance_to_the_horizon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon#Distance_to_the_horizo...) I can't find conclusive evidence, but I think that's unlikely, given that the planned cruising height was 4300m (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Shootdown_of_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Shootdown_...), and it was shot down about halfway through its flight. I'm not sure whether using binoculars at 20km distance makes sense, though. There's quite a size difference, but even if it would be easy to spot the difference from that far away having half a minute or so to find the plane using your binoculars would be challenging (it's about a minute of flight for a passenger plane, but if it were military, you would want to hit it before it had a chance to fire a missile, and according to Wikipedia, the Maverick that they feared an Iranian F14 might carry has a range of over 12 nautical miles)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 10y ago
> it was the right call based on the data Vincennes had, It was, at the most generous, the right call based on the misinterpretation of that data by the crew.