Agreed. To a military system in certain modes there are only two kinds of people - friendly military aircraft and everyone else. Just because a target is transmitting civilian codes doesn't mean it is a civilian - it could very well be a strike aircraft spoofing, trying to get close. So under certain circumstances air defenses will engage anything not positively ID'd as a friendly, ie. transmitting the codes of the day. Typically you'd like for the hostile parties to issue warnings "XYZ is an active war zone, any aircraft in our air-defense identification zone may be engaged...etc. etc." Basically, private/commercial aircraft stay out. In less than full-on hostilities things get more complicated. In that case, just because something isn't a friendly military aircraft, doesn't necessarily mean it is hostile (eg. it might be a Ukrainian airliner). Then you have to go to the trouble of tracking it, looking for hostile actions (attack runs, high G maneuvers, etc.) and/or contact it on the radio, warn it away from your AOR, or some such.
Or maybe you screw up, panic, and shoot. Or maybe you screw up, put the system in some automated mode where it is allowed to fire on anything not positively ID'd as friendly. ie. you've gone "weapons free" instead of "weapons tight." In that case the air defense computer of a mobile system (like the SA-15) probably cannot tell the difference between an airliner climbing out and a hostile attack aircraft pulling off a run on an adjacent unit - so it would engage.
Or, as someone else pointed out...Maybe you fire on purpose, to further escalate tensions. Or maybe there was someone or several someones on that aircraft that powerful people wanted taken out of play. It sounds horrific - kill nearly 200 people in order to remove one or two... But make no mistake, there are people in this world who would order that as casually as you or I would order a latte.
Multiple news reports have pictures of holes in the fuselage where the aluminum is bent inward. Thus shrapnel blowing holes from the outside of the plane.
"Or maybe there was someone or several someones on that aircraft that powerful people wanted taken out of play. It sounds horrific - kill nearly 200 people in order to remove one or two... But make no mistake, there are people in this Iranian Regime world, who would order that as casually as you or I would order a latte. 25 posted on 1/9/2020, 5:33:53 AM by ThunderSleeps ( Be ready!)