Word: airbus
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...high-altitude aircraft at more than 1,000 miles. One thing Aegis radar cannot do, however, is reliably distinguish the size and shape of an aircraft. Sideways, a longer plane might give off two blips to a shorter plane's one. But head-on, Aegis radar cannot tell an Airbus from an F-14. No radar can, the Pentagon insists...
Except, of course, that the plane identified by the Vincennes as a 62-ft.- long F-14 Tomcat fighter turned out to be a 177-ft.-long Iran Air Airbus carrying 290 civilians on a regularly scheduled flight to Dubai on the other side of the gulf. As a horrified world last week watched the pictures of torn bodies displayed by Iran on TV screens, questions mounted. Outside Iran, hardly anyone seemed to doubt that the shootdown had been a genuine mistake. But how could so sophisticated and costly ($600 million a copy ) an intelligence-and-weapons system...
...reasonably complete answer will have to wait several weeks until experts finish analyzing tapes from the Vincennes and other U.S. Navy vessels in the gulf. And some questions about the affair may never be resolved. Why, for example, did the Airbus pilot not answer the warnings issued in the last minutes before the shootdown? But enough has become known in the week since the tragedy to suggest a terrible conclusion, one with dismaying implications for a nuclear-armed world: the U.S., and by extension other countries using high-tech weapons, may have become prisoners of a technology so speedy...
...United States says the Airbus A300 did not respond to repeated questioning by the Vincennes about its identity and the cruiser's captain believed it was an Iranian F-14 fighter transmitting ambiguous signals and descending in attack pattern...
...detailed, two-hour speech, Velayati said the Airbus never heard warnings from the Vincennes, the plane transmitted only unambiguous civilian signals, it remained in the recognized international air corridor and was climbing when the missiles were fired...