Word: plane
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 to the target. A mere seven minutes after the plane had been detected...
...over enormous distances at every form of threat. Aegis radar can supposedly spot a basketball at 150 miles and a 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...
...then, can the Aegis system or its operators tell what kind of aircraft they are tracking? One method is flight pattern. Although the Pentagon at first asserted that the Airbus was outside the normal pathway for airline flights over the gulf, it has since conceded that the plane stayed within the 20-mi.-wide corridor all the time. The Pentagon claimed, however, that the pilot had wandered toward the western edge of the corridor and corrected that by veering back east toward the center line. As fate would have it, that turn headed the plane in the direction...
Even given the identification of the mystery plane as an F-14, there is some dispute as to whether an unmodified version of the craft would be capable of doing much damage to the Vincennes. The planes, built in the U.S. and sold to Iran in the 1970s during the reign of the Shah, are designed to fight other aircraft and are ordinarily equipped only with air-to-air, not ship-killing, missiles. The Pentagon retorts that Iran is known to have Harpoon antiship missiles and could have fired them; other experts doubt it. In any case, say some pilots...