Flight 752 was hit by two missiles and crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran’s main airport
Tehran:
Iran said the misalignment of an air defense unit’s radar system was the main “human error” that led to the accidental destruction of a Ukrainian passenger plane in January.
“A failure occurred due to a human error in the monitoring of the procedure” of alignment of the radar, causing a “107 degree error” in the system, said on Saturday evening the Iranian civil aviation organization (CAD).
This error “triggered a chain of risks” which saw new errors made in the minutes before the plane was shot down, according to the CAO document, presented as a “factual report” and not as the final report of the investigation of the accident.
Flight 752, a Ukrainian International Airlines airliner, was hit by two missiles and crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran’s main airport on January 8, at a time when tensions between United States and Iran were intensifying.
The Islamic Republic admitted several days later that its forces had accidentally shot down the plane bound for Kiev, killing the 176 people on board.
The CAO stated that, despite the erroneous information available to the operator of the radar system on the path of the aircraft, he could have identified his target as an airliner, but that there was rather a “misidentification “.
The report also noted that the first of two missiles launched on the plane was fired by a defense unit operator who acted “without receiving a response from the Coordination Center” on which he depended.
The second missile was launched 30 seconds later, “observing the trajectory of the detected target,” the report added.
Tehran’s air defenses were on high alert when the jet was shot down in case the United States retaliated against the Iranian strikes a few hours earlier on American troops stationed in Iraq.
The strikes were carried out in response to the murder of a senior Iranian official, Qasem Soleimani, in an American drone strike near Baghdad airport.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
