Word: airbus
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...when the fragmentary results of Rear Admiral William Fogarty's investigation leaked last week, blame fell not on the machines but on the men who were operating them. Under the pressure of combat, Pentagon sources say, the overwrought sailors on the Vincennes misread the radar data about the oncoming Airbus and passed faulty information to Captain Will Rogers III. He then ordered the launching of the two missiles that destroyed the plane, killing all 290 aboard...
...accidental U.S. downing of an Iranian Airbus on July 3, with the loss of 290 lives, may have figured indirectly in Iran's policy switch. For one thing, Tehran chose to protest the incident by sending its Foreign Minister before the U.N. Security Council, a forum that it had assiduously avoided since Resolution 598 was passed over its objections last July. For another, the shootdown gave relatively moderate political figures a chance to argue the futility of continuing a war that, they insisted, the U.S. would never permit Iraq to lose. That line of reasoning had emerged on previous occasions...
Simultaneously, Ali Akbar Velayati, Iran's Foreign Minister, was trying to convince the Security Council that the shootdown was deliberate. He read a transcript of conversations between the pilot of the doomed Airbus and Iranian flight controllers that seemed to indicate that Flight 655 had been proceeding at a normal altitude, speed and flight path. However, on one crucial point -- whether the U.S.S. Vincennes had tried to warn the Airbus -- the transcript was inconclusive. Flight 655 received no warnings, but the pilot may have been too busy chattering to his ground controllers to listen to an emergency channel over which...
July has not been kind to Tehran. Only two weeks after the U.S.S. Vincennes downed an Iran Air Airbus, Baghdad began the last stages of a counteroffensive that promised to drive the remaining Iranian soldiers from Iraqi soil. By overrunning Iran's military headquarters on the southern front, Iraq gained control of the vital Shatt al Arab waterway, providing another sign that the eight-year-old gulf war was tilting in Iraq's favor...
...destruction of the Iranian airbus should, by rights, lead to some form of searing national soul-searching. Whatever the provocation, whatever the perceived danger, whatever the rectitude of America's mission in the gulf, it was the Vincennes that fatally fired. The captain, who was only following proper procedures, may be free of personal fault. But no matter how understandable each of the Navy's actions, the fact remains that a string of American decisions created a situation that led to the shooting down of the Iranian airbus...