The doomed Ukrainian flight was scheduled to depart at 5:15 am but was delayed to 6:12 am. The closest scheduled takeoff to that time was Turkish Airlines Flight 899 with a scheduled departure (to Istanbul) of 6:20 am. That Istanbul flight was of course immediately cancelled upon the crash of the Ukrainian plane.
This information may be totally irrelevant but is good to know. Wonder who all was manifested on the Turkish flight. If the Ukrainian plane was sot down, it might not have been the target.
The Iranian Military is basically incompetent. If they were trying to shoot down a specific plane, I don’t think they could have done it. This has the earmarks of a trigger happy idiot.
There was a 1/2 hour between the doomed flight and The plane before (Qatar 777) which turned east before it overflew the Parand power station (and therefore didn’t overfly the military base boundary). The UIA 737 was the first plane to overfly the military base north of Parand in an hour. Maybe there was a shift change at the SAM battery and the new guy didn’t get the memo.