U.S. Believes Ukraine Plane Was Shot Down by Iran: U.S. Official (opens in new tab)

from the CNN article: One possibility being considered is that an Iranian missile unit saw something on their radar, thought they were under attack and fired.

This is one danger of brinksmanship, which is that people's fingers are hovering a little too close to the trigger. If that is indeed what happened here, we can only hope that the powers that be realize that their saber-rattling was a cause of these deaths.

The interesting thing is NYT reporting that the aircraft had turned back towards Tehran airport before crashing. That could be a sign of technical troubles or the aircraft was warned to return to the airport because of active AA systems in the area.

I was thinking with all the military action going on, someone had to have pretty good coverage looking for missile launches.

It raises the question how you even can manage having an active / ready to fire anti-air system online and commercial planes active?

"Of the 176 people on board, 82 were Iranian, 63 were Canadian and 11 were Ukrainian (including nine crewmembers), along with 10 Swedish, seven Afghan and three German nationals. None survived." What a tragedy.

I encourage everyone to read AV Herald- a site closely linked to the aviation community. Their coverage of this developing story is impressive.

http://avherald.com/h?article=4d1aea51&opt=0

CNN article has no paywall:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/09/politics/is-iran-ukraine-plan...

The CNN article says that Newsweek was first to report the story:

https://www.newsweek.com/iranians-shot-down-ukraine-flight-m...

Plane took off and according to Iranians had a 1 in a million chance engine fire. The plane continues to fly, it has multiple engines for redundancy.

The video showing a missile hitting a plane and later catching fire and crashing. Pictures of a missile at the crash site; shrapnel damage on the plane for sure. Unclear if it's legit or not, but lets say it's legit. It was shot down.

If it were Iran who shot it down. Why were there multiple people awake in the middle of the night recording a dark sky on the off chance Iran shoots their own plane down? If it were the Iran government they wouldn't want evidence like that.

Why were the Americans so quick at being able to say Iran shot down the plane?

Is it perhaps because (label group here) had an Iranian AA missile to use in Tehran. Had their agents record the missile attack so that they could blame Iran?

That's the more likely story.

Interesting how Trump was very untrumplike calling for peace earlier.

Interesting how there were no American citizens on that plane.

Not sure who did it.