[DBrow]

There were lots of questions about this when it happened. In particular, the bodies found floating were intact, naked, and bloated. Not quite what one would expect in a missile shootdown with a fireball of fuel.

There was speculation that the transponder on the plane was chirping “F15”, so when the search radar picked it up it was ID’d as a hostile. In other words, a setup which teh global press pounced on like they had been waiting for the go signal.

Whatever the cause or whether it was a setup, someone put the crosshairs on the blip and pushed the button.

[tanknetter]

I have a friend who was on an oiler in the Indian Ocean at the time. The Vincennes had a real rep as an a**hole ship with something to prove. The Capt was just itching for the chance to actually do something with his nice, shiny Aegis Cruiser.

The friend also stressed to me the desire and need for aggressive ship commanders in the Navy, but that the Vincennes CO took it to a much different level.

[PhiloBedo]

IIRC, there was a report that there were 2 Iranian Tomcats shadowing the airliner, probably to sneak attack the US destroyer. Once the destroyer locked on, and fired the missiles, the Tomcats broke off and ran.

[Phlyer]

Whatever the cause or whether it was a setup, someone put the crosshairs on the blip and pushed the button.

Flying a passenger airliner through a region where your own forces are actively engaged with USN surface warships may qualify as a setup in itself. At the time, some of the high-speed attack boats that the Iranians were using were actively firing on the Vincennes, which was returning fire with the 5-in gun. Then an aircraft starts to fly right over the cruiser, and - despite multiple hails on appropriate emergency frequencies - refuses to reply or change course.

What I understand was the proximate cause was that a relatively junior officer got confused in the intensity of the moment and started reading a range indication as an altitude indication. The range was decreasing as the aircraft flew toward the cruiser, and but it was interpreted as decreasing altitude as the target dove toward the ship. Diving toward the ship - at high speed - is an offensive maneuver and so the ship fired on the threat.

The error was in mis-reading the displays, but it was a real error and resulted in the loss of many civilian lives. It was something to 'regret', but at the same time flying an airliner over a warship actively engaged in combat with your own national forces at least has to be considered a 'contributing' cause.

As a technical note, you don't set a transponder to a code that identifies the type of aircraft. The codes are set to the flight type - one of many IFR codes for airliners or other IFR traffic, with special codes for emergencies of various types. There are separate military signal formats that an airliner wouldn't have anyway, but not aircraft-type-ID codes. Also, the Iranians didn't (and don't) have any F-15s. They had F-14s. On the other hand, a false transponder code wasn't required.