Originally Posted by
rickair7777
BS narrative that evolved after the fact.
I actually knew some of the folks involved. The CO was aggressive, but he was also in combat and entitled to protect his ship and crew if in doubt. There is always fog of war, even more so when the engagement is happening in the middle of densely populated water and airways. No sympathy, Iran should have just canceled commercial flights over the gulf while they were attacking US forces. I'm pretty sure the regime kind of hoped something like that would happen. They definitely did not mind when it did.
You work for the FAA, you know darn well that WE would have closed the airspace, not just kept launching unwitting martyrs into the line of fire.
There were lessons learned for future reference. But the powers that be didn't monday morning QB the guy.
An airliner squawking a civilian code the entire time, on a known civilian route, in contact with ATC the entire time, on commercial air corridor amber 59, yet the ship tried to contact them on military frequencies and did not have any equipment for civilian air traffic frequencies. And because ethe US navy personnel didn't follow their own rules for resetting range identification, they (on the ship) designated it with an erroneous unfriendly IFF code, also erroneously stating that the aircraft was descending towards the ship, which it was not. And as opposed to the ship that shot it down, the crew of USS Sides, which issued one final challenge after the 10 of Vincennes, indicated that they had from take-off identified Flight 655 as a commercial flight. We had issued a NOTAM to stay more than 5 miles away from warships and that civilian traffic may continue as long as it originated/went to approved locations, which this one did. We screwed this up bad. Fog of war isn't an excuse to not follow procedure.