A possible disruption in Iran’s radar network by the U.S. may have caused the operator mistake the Ukrainian passenger plan for an incoming American cruise missile, at top Iranian military official said late on Tuesday.Guess what? If Iranian radar is so easily fooled, then no one has any business trying to use it to shoot down objects that could be passenger airplanes!
Ali Abdollahi, the deputy commander of the Armed Forces General Headquarters for coordination affairs, said “the U.S. mischiefs in the region have been proven before, and so far Iran’s cyber systems have observed and recorded virtual objects manufactured by the U.S. in the country’s airspace”
“Disruption in performance of radar systems by the United States is not unprecedented,” the military official told national TV.
Abdollahi said a team has been established to investigate such a possibility.
Meanwhile, Forbes has been interviewing experts who make it sound like either Iran's air defense operators are incredibly incompetent or criminally negligent.
David Deptula, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general who heads the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, [says] “There are a lot of question marks as to why and how this could have happened.”--
The Boeing 737-800 was transmitting a unique transponder identification code. If the equipment on the SA-15 that picks that up, called an IFF interrogator, was malfunctioning, battery operators would typically look at the schedule of airline traffic through their area and see if the target matched with a scheduled flight, Deptula says. Flight PS 752 was delayed by almost an hour from its scheduled departure, taking off at 6:12 a.m.
The SA-15 operators also would have considered the path and speed of the plane on radar. “Is it operating at low altitude, at high speed, headed toward a sensitive area”? Deptula asks. Flight PS 752 was rising toward 8,000 feet at a relatively sedate speed of 275 knots when flight tracking data from its transponder cut out, a normal profile for an airliner, he says. “It is departing the area, climbing through medium altitude, not trying to hide its signature, looking like a routine operation.”
Security camera footage published by the New York Times on Tuesday shows the flight of two interceptor missiles from launch to detonation, which provides a basis to estimate where the air defense battery was located: 12.9 kilometers (8 miles) away from where the first missile intercepted the plane, likely parked at the southern end of the Bidganeh missile base, estimates Carlo Kopp, a defense analyst and cofounder of the think tank Air Power Australia.
That’s beyond the 12-km maximum range of SA-15 missiles listed by the manufacturer, Almaz-Antey. Even assuming actual performance is better, the distance and the geometry of targeting a hostile aircraft on the flight path the airliner was on made launching missiles at that point a “hail Mary shot,” says Kopp, and one that training manuals for Soviet-pedigree systems using the same guidance system discourage taking.
Another discordant note is that the air defense unit is said to have determined that the object they were tracking was a cruise missile when it was 19 km away. Given the small size of a cruise missile, the SA-15’s search radar isn’t able to produce a stable targeting track to shoot at from so far away, Kopp says. Only a large object like the 737 would.
“When the IRGC leadership say the operators thought it was a cruise missile, it says to an expert that the operators did not understand the limitations of their equipment,” he says.