You know, I hesitated to engage here, but I will because I love a good thought experiment, so let’s do this.
First, my comment was not intended to paint the United States as having lily-white hands. Have we killed innocents? Yes. But, I invite to compare the scenarios to see just how dissimilar they are.
Let’s take the first example, Iran Air Flight 655. The USS Vincennes did shoot the airliner down, killing 290 people. The IFF Mode 3 “squawk” is a generic signal that any military aircraft could replicate. However, the US acknowledged its mistake, Capt. Rogers was cashiered, his wife narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by car bomb, and the US paid the victims families $131M in damages.
Now, for the second, TWA Flight 800. I’m not sure what to do with this here.
The airplane in question was manufactured in 1971. When it went down, it was over two decades old. It was above angels 15 (FL150) when it went up, well outside of the most optimistic range of even the most advanced MANPADs like FIM-92 Stinger. Had it been shot down by something more powerful, a radar would have needed to be used for target acquisition. This would have been like a veritable volcanic eruption on emissions tracing. Nobody can hide that.
95% of the wreckage was recovered, none of it indicated a strike from anti-air missile. The CVR indicated that the number 4 engine had an immense spike in fuel flow seconds before eyewitnesses reported the massive streak of fire in the sky.
Again, not sure where to go with this.
Okay, now let’s contrast this with what my original point was. I’m not that worried about the Russians trying to goad American aviators into air combat because this was a fairly common practice in the Cold War. My point is that the Russians have done much worse and it never started World War 3.
The first one was Korean Air Lines Flight 902, shot down by a Russian Air Force Su-15 interceptor that literally had eyes on the aircraft right before he shot it down. The aircraft immediately went into a dive and in a feat of airmanship that rivals anything I’ve ever seen, the KAL pilot managed to land the stricken plane on a frozen lake in the Kola Peninsula. Kind of hard to say it was a spy plane when a bunch of passengers come crawling out of the wreckage. The survivors were interned for two days, the flight crew for nine. No money was paid to survivors.
In an almost exact replication of the first event, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was flying from Anchorage to Seoul. Another Boeing, another Su-15 fighter that had eyes-on a civilian airliner, shot it down anyway, all souls lost. The airliner crashed off the coast of Sakhalin, and the Russians denied everything until the belongings of the passengers (and later, their remains) started washing up on the Japanese shoreline, including a US Congressman. It wasn’t until Yeltsin took office in 1992 that the Russians even admitted they shot at it. No money paid to the families of the dead.
And let’s not forget the Russian forces that shot down Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17. No guilt admitted, no money paid to survivors.
My original point is that the Russians have pushed the boundaries, this is no exception.
Just FYI if you haven’t seen the News and events yet.