A few minutes after 6 a.m. Tehran time Wednesday, Ukraine International Flight 752 took off from Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1283564
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1283564
Flashback to 1988 and the US shooting down an Iranian airliner–and killing everyone on board–and claiming they mistook it for a fighter?
I’m sure that’s what Iran is remembering.
ETA I’m not assuming that’s what happened, especially since it’s a 737.
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Everyone at first thought TWA 800 was shot down by a missile, and it turned out to be a short in fuel tank wiring that caused an explosion. Planes rarely blow up in the air nowadays, the last one was shot down by the Russians over Ukraine, so it is suspicious (especially given the timing and it being a Ukrainian plane), but it’s also completely possible that there was a technical failure of some kind. The obvious culprit is an engine…the engines in those planes may have an issue that can cause a fan blade failure, and just the right kind of failure could do something like damage the wing enough to cause the plane to bank, catch on fire, and crash.
Investigations take a while, but odds are we will hear something quickly, an exploding plane will show a damage pattern that tells you where the exposition originated, and that’s almost always the whole story. Hopefully the political complications don’t interfere with the investigation…it would be good if the Iranians invited the NTSB and Boeing to join the investigation, both because of their experience and to help smooth the politics over.
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"Soon after the crash, according to multiple reports, the Ukrainian embassy in Iran released a statement ruling out terrorism as the cause of the crash. Later, it took the statement down and said “any statements about the causes of the accident before the decision of the commission are not official.”
It’s contagious!
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First thing that I thought of too.
Within 10 minutes, the plane had exploded in midair and crashed into a field, killing all 167 passengers and nine crew on board.
TWA Flight 800 exploded 12 minutes after takeoff on July 17, 1996. Many people still don’t believe that it was a short in the fuel tank.
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They are very good at putting things together. BBC has a video simulation of exactly what brought the plane down over Ukraine. It’s down about the middle of the page. Fascinating how they put the pieces together.
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I’ve been suspicious of this since finding this out early this a.m., time, place and now not wanting outside help in the investigation.
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The crash aircraft is a 737-800, not a 737 MAX. The -800 is a damn good plane.
The MAX is a horror show. But it’s a totally different aircraft. (In fact, Boeing’s urgent business need to pretend that it’s not different from the 737 models that preceded it is at the heart of the bad decisions that led to the two MAX crashes and the ongoing grounding.)
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The aviation expert who spoke to BBC news hour said if the video is genuine, and the plane came apart in midair, it was most likely a missile or a bomb. He said if there were some other kind of incident, such a recently manufactured plane would not disintegrate. He thought the fact that pilots didn’t even have time to communicate a problem also argued for a missile strike or a bomb explosion on board.
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“Exploded in midair”!??!
Bomb I expect except the majority were Iranian or Iranian origin…
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What video?
One of Iran’s leaders alluded to that attack by pointing out that Iran has 290 reasons to attack America when the dotard threatened Iran with 52 attacks to avenge the taking of the embassy hostages way back during their revolution. That passenger plane was targeted by an American navy ship I believe.
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Wow I have never heard that excuse/reason for the passenger jet going down. Who was able to get hold of the black boxes/plane parts to make that determination. I had thought it was pretty settled that a navy vessel had fired the missile with records from the ship etc… A mistake most likely but the navy ship did the dirty deed nonetheless. Where did you come up with that theory?
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As it was heading south over the Persian Gulf so how did they gather up enough pieces to figure out that it was an equipment malfunction rather than a shoot down?
They don’t want America or Boeing setting the storyline down. Both have reasons to not be honest.
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My guess is a trigger happy Iranian AA battery. This was during the missile strike last night, tensions were high and something as simple as a basic radar glitch and a nervous commander could have resulted in an accidental misidentification. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
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One thing I didn’t know until today was the captain’s wife of the ship that shot down Iran Air 655 had her minivan targeted with a pipe bomb 9 months after the plane was shot down. She was not hurt.
Nine months after the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, on the morning of March 10, 1989, Rogers’ wife Sharon escaped uninjured when a pipe bomb exploded and set fire to her minivan as she sat stopped at a red light across the street from the University Towne Center shopping mall in San Diego. The van was registered in the name of Will Rogers III, and many people at the time of the bombing suspected that terrorism was involved.[5] Five months later, the Associated Press reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had shifted focus away from terrorism towards the possibility of someone with a personal vendetta against Captain Rogers.[15] As of 2003, the bombing of Rogers’ van remains an unsolved case, despite a major investigation involving at some time up to 300 police and FBI agents
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You’re confused. People are talking about TWA flight 800 out of New York that blew up in 1996, not the Ukrainian Airlines flight that crashed in Iran or the Iran Air passenger plane that was shot down by the USS Vincennes in 1988. Many note the similarities with TWA 800.
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You are confusing two different incidents. TWA 800 was a 747 that crashed shortly after takeoff from JFK in 1996. The NTSB concluded that the cause was not a bomb but rather an explosion in one of the fuel tanks. It found evidence of wiring issues that could have caused a spark which could ignite fuel vapor in the tank.
The Iranian jet that you are thinking of was downed by a missile launched from the USS Vincennes in 1988. The exact circumstances are disputed however President Reagan did apologize and pay reparations to the victims families.
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AA error seems most likely.
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