Word: gulf
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first, it seemed like a triumph of high technology. Supersophisticated radar aboard the U.S.S. Vincennes picked up the airplane almost as soon as it took off from the Iranian airport of Bandar Abbas, on the shores of the Persian Gulf. Within moments the radar received enough information about altitude, speed and flight path for Captain Will Rogers III to reach a conclusion: the plane was a hostile fighter flying an attack pattern. An IFF (Identification, Friend or Foe) signal bounced back by the approaching aircraft seemed to confirm that conclusion. Two missiles launched by the Vincennes were electronically guided precisely...
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...
...sure, that is not the only consideration: simple inattention on both sides also figures into the tragedy. On the American side, the military claims that it does not systematically monitor civilian air traffic over the gulf. In fact, a Pentagon official told TIME that the Navy had not even provided the Vincennes with a schedule of Iran Air flights. Captain Rogers did ask a crew member to look into whatever material on civilian flights he had aboard. But none of it mentioned Iran Air Flight 655. Had Rogers known that a commercial flight was scheduled overhead at that time (Flight...
...possible that the Navy does not track civilian air traffic in the gulf region -- particularly regular flights like the 655, which must have appeared on U.S. radar screens hundreds of times before? The answer seems to be simply that nobody thought it necessary to do so. The Navy is just not used to operating in the half-war, half-peace atmosphere of the gulf, where harmless passengers and deadly enemies all whizz through the same cramped airspace. The Aegis system is designed for the open seas, where Pentagon planners mistakenly thought that wars would be fought...