Tragedy Over Tehran


UPDATE: January 11, 2019

AFTER THREE days of denials, Iran has admitted that its military was accidentally responsible for last Wednesday’s downing of a Ukrainian 737 outside of Tehran. Now the politics will kick in, with calls for formal apology, restitution, and so on. As these things tend to go, expect a lot of drawn-out diplomatic haggling while the story fades from the headlines.

So there you have it. Ukraine International flight 752 becomes history’s fourth-deadliest military shoot-down of a civilian jetliner:

1. in 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17, a Boeing 777 en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, is blown from the sky over Ukraine by a rocket fired by pro-Russia separatists. All 298 passengers and crew are killed.

2. In 1988, the crew of the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes accidentally shoots down Iran Air flight 655 over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard.

3. In 1983, 269 are killed when Korean Air Lines flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet fighter jet after straying off course — and into Soviet airspace.

4. In 2020, an Iranian military battery mistakes Ukraine International flight 752 for a cruise missile and destroys it, killing 176 passengers and crew.

5. In 1973, Israeli Air Force jets fire on a Libyan Arab Airlines 727 over the Sinai. The plane crash-lands in the desert near the Suez Canal killing 108 of the 113 people on board.

It’s ironic, if that’s the right word, to see both Iran and Ukraine as unwitting partners in this latest tragedy. Ukraine was the setting for the Malaysia Airlines catastrophe, while Iran was host to the Vincennes debacle.

And this is the second such incident in just five years. I wouldn’t call this a trend, exactly, but we’re liable to see it again. All around the world one finds increasingly dangerous hotspots, where twitchy triggermen are armed with extremely lethal weaponry. You also have more airplanes flying than ever before.

Several nations have announced they will, for the time being, no longer permit their carriers to operate in Iranian airspace. Lufthansa has canceled its Tehran flights altogether.

Commercial flights between the U.S. and destinations in the Middle East and India have, until now, routinely passed through Iranian airspace. I have several pretty out-the-window photos of the snow-dusted Iranian mountains, as well as the cities of Isfahan and Qom, taken during flights out of Dubai and Doha. Emirates and Qatar Airways are now re-routing their U.S.-bound flights over Iraq instead.

I remember piloting a flight to Mumbai a few years ago and passing just north of Tehran. It was striking how well the Iranian controllers spoke English. More clearly than most European controllers.

 

UPDATE: January 9, 2019

U.S. OFFICIALS now say that Ukraine International flight 752 was shot down by a pair of surface-to-air missiles presumably fired in error by the Iranian military. This was a suspicion from the start, and although nothing is definitive, things are trending strongly in this direction.

Authorities in Iran, for their part, aren’t being especially forthcoming, which is hardly unexpected.

Ordinarily in incidents where a 737 airliner is involved, Boeing and the NTSB would participate in the investigation. Tensions being what they are the moment, that’s not going to happen. However, the Iranians say they will share necessary information with Canada, Sweden, Ukraine, and possibly other nations whose citizens were aboard the doomed flight. whether this information will include the plane’s data and voice recorders isn’t clear.

 

UPDATER: January 8, 2020

EARLIER TODAY, a Ukraine International Airlines flight carrying 176 people slammed into the ground shortly after takeoff from Imam Khomeini International Airport outside Tehran. There were no survivors. The plane was a Boeing 737-800 — the most popular of the many 737 variants.

It is safe to say there is no connection between this crash and the 737 MAX disasters. The -800 is an older model and has no MCAS system. Otherwise, however, there’s little to go on.

News reports keep bringing up “engine failure.” This can mean different things, but a 737, like any commercial jetliner, is fully capable of flying with one engine, so a simple failure, strictly speaking, is very unlikely to be the cause. If an engine somehow was the culprit, it would need to have been an uncontained failure, whereby the engine’s internal components, which rotate at thousands of RPM, punctured the wing or fuselage, touching off a fire or loss of control.

It hardly needs saying, meanwhile, with the crash coming only hours after Iran launched a missile attack on a U.S. compound in Iraq, that something more sinister could be at hand. An errant shoot-down, an intentional shoot-down, a Russian sabotage — pick your poison. Iranian authorities are, for now, refusing to hand over the voice or data recorders, which means either nothing or everything.

On July 3, 1988, the crew of the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes, distracted during a skirmish with Iranian gunboats in the Straits of Hormuz, accidentally shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300 en route to Dubai, killing 290 civilians. The U.S. later awarded over $60 million to the families of the passengers. Most Americans don’t remember this, but it has never been forgotten in Iran, where some hardliners claim the shoot-down was intentional (no evidence suggests this, though the Vincennes crew clearly was negligent).

Could Wednesday’s crash in Tehran be some kind of revenge? It’s doubtful, as there were no Americans on board. Unless that too is part of the deadly geopolitical chess match we seem to be playing now. Still, there’s no denying the crash — the timing, the location, the seizing of the recorders — is suspicious.

Ukraine International operates 36 aircraft, most of them Boeings, including roughly two dozen 737s.

 

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November 19, 2022 · Filed under Uncategorized