Missile likely culprit in crash

Nervous Iranian crew may have been responsible

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, along with U.S. and Britain, has said there is strong evidence that Iranian surface-to-air missiles (SAM) shot down Ukrainian International Airlines flight 752 soon after its takeoff from Tehran.

An accidental targeting of this airliner should not have been possible as it was transmitting active identification and position data and had just taken off from the airport under radar control and full contact with Tehran Air Traffic Control, according to a pre-filed flight plan.

Tehran airport is also far from Iran’s borders. It is an unlikely place for the first contact to be made against a U.S. missile or combat aircraft strike package. The absence of warnings from radar and SAM units watching Iran’s borders should have indicated there were no U.S. attacks into Iranian airspace.

The Kiev-bound flight should not have been identified as hostile.

So what happened?

The most likely culprit appears to be a Russian-made SA-15 Tor M-1 SAM system based near the Mehrabad airbase on the outskirts of Tehran.

Photographs which claimed to be from the crash site the morning after the plane came down showed the distinctive tail section and nose cone of the 9K331 missile fired by an SA-15.

As a short-range mobile defence SAM, the SA-15 is designed to be effective without being linked up to a wider national air defence radar picture.

U.S. authorities are likely to have identified the infrared signature of the SAM launches and the destruction of flight 752 using the Space Based Infrared Surveillance system, satellites and ground stations that can detect missile launches. The radar signature of an SA-15 engagement using an RC135W standoff spy plane is also possible.

The most likely scenario is that a badly trained or inexperienced crew of an SA-15, scared of being hit as part of a retaliatory U.S. strike following the ballistic missile attacks on bases in Iraq, made a series of tragic and incorrect assumptions when flight 752 appeared on their radar screen.

Perhaps operating with many communications systems switched off to avoid being detected and targeted by the U.S., they might have had a reduced situational awareness picture.

It may never be known if the operators manually overruled automatic safety procedures that may have made such an accident unlikely.