Word: traffics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Almost all the traffic is by rail, along a line that Czarist Russia helped build in the late 19th century from Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, to the Pacific port city of Vladivostok, more than 300 miles to the southeast. The principal border-crossing point for the region is Suifenhe, five hours by the daily milk train from Mudanjiang, near the Ussuri River, scene of some of the fiercest fighting in 1969. Here too there are plenty of reminders of potential trouble. Green military staff cars dart about the streets, their horns blowing at pedestrians and the occasional horse-drawn...
...small number of Soviets in Suifenhe help manage the rail traffic. Vladimir Dudin, 38, lives for days, sometimes weeks, at a time in a converted refrigerator car on a siding at the Suifenhe train station. He has a tiny black-and-white television that is not powerful enough to pick up Soviet broadcasts; he has to settle for such fare as the U.S.-made series Little House on the Prairie dubbed in Chinese...
...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...
...Iranian side, both civilian and military jets take off from Bandar Abbas airport. Military traffic controllers keep close watch on ship movements in the gulf; they must have known that the Vincennes was engaged in a gun battle with Iranian speedboats (two were eventually sunk) only twelve miles offshore at the southern end of the gulf at the very moment that Flight 655 took off. Yet apparently nobody warned the civilian traffic controllers that Flight 655's path would take it directly over a developing firefight; had the controllers known that, they say, they would have delayed the takeoff...