The Shoot-Down Of Iran Air Flight 665 ...

[Terrorfex]

Way back when Iran and Iraq were getting ready to pitch human-wave attacks against gunships and fighter jets, the U.S. Navy deployed to the Gulf, ostensibly to protect foreign-flagged tankers who were finding it hard to get the black stuff where it needed to go without being shot-up by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in dinghies.

 

An infamous incident, familiar to some, was when one of these cruisers accidentally blew an Iranian Air A300 out of the sky after mistaking it for an Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force F-14. The recriminations were legendary; a cover-up suspected and the fall-out from that incident went on to have very real repurcussions, not only for the whole Middle-East but also U.S. foreign policy and also served as a lesson that it doesn't matter how technologically splendid your weapons of war are, if you don't actually know how to use them.

 

Sea of Lies - the truth behind the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655.

[muttondressedaslamb]

Tragic and galling that these men were treated as heroes. To the victor goes the spoils.

[Ke1t]

It's a balancing act between keeping up the official line and current political expedience.

 

Once upon a time the majority of Yanks believed that the American government could never and would never deliberately... or even accidentally... perpetrate a crime or illegal act.

 

You really have to admire a mindset so stoic and set in its belief of its own infallibility that it couldn't even accidentally do anything wrong, but that was the mindset. And for many, though the minority now, I think, that still is the mindset.

 

Flight 93 is a perfect example.

 

Even when, I think, most of us would have gone ahead and ordered Flight 93 shot down, sacrificing the passengers on board (who were likely going to die anyway) to save potentially thousands of lives, the American government denies it shot that aircraft down. Many of the public, I believe the vast majority Bush-supporting Republicans, won't even entertain the notion that the aircraft was shot down. Not even in scenario such as that which transpired on the 11th of November 2001 do they believe it could have happened.

 

Without even going over the clues to flight 93 having been shot down, and there is some strong evidence to suggest it was, anyone even suggesting it was shot down is shouted down as a crank or a conspiracy theorist.

 

And there are numerous other examples of the US government fucking over its own people, but for many, many Americans there just isn't any possible way their government, and by extension the American people, could ever do anything that isn't entirely altruistic.

[Terrorfex]

It's a balancing act between keeping up the official line and current political expedience.

 

Once upon a time the majority of Yanks believed that the American government could never and would never deliberately... or even accidentally... perpetrate a crime or illegal act.

 

You really have to admire a mindset so stoic and set in its belief of its own infallibility that it couldn't even accidentally do anything wrong, but that was the mindset. And for many, though the minority now, I think, that still is the mindset.

 

Flight 93 is a perfect example.

 

Even when, I think, most of us would have gone ahead and ordered Flight 93 shot down, sacrificing the passengers on board (who were likely going to die anyway) to save potentially thousands of lives, the American government denies it shot that aircraft down. Many of the public, I believe the vast majority Bush-supporting Republicans, won't even entertain the notion that the aircraft was shot down. Not even in scenario such as that which transpired on the 11th of November 2001 do they believe it could have happened.

 

Without even going over the clues to flight 93 having been shot down, and there is some strong evidence to suggest it was, anyone even suggesting it was shot down is shouted down as a crank or a conspiracy theorist.

 

And there are numerous other examples of the US government fucking over its own people, but for many, many Americans there just isn't any possible way their government, and by extension the American people, could ever do anything that isn't entirely altruistic.

 

 

What kind of evidence is available, out of curiosity, to suggest it was deliberately shot down?

[Woolenrouge]

It's a balancing act between keeping up the official line and current political expedience.

 

Once upon a time the majority of Yanks believed that the American government could never and would never deliberately... or even accidentally... perpetrate a crime or illegal act.

 

You really have to admire a mindset so stoic and set in its belief of its own infallibility that it couldn't even accidentally do anything wrong, but that was the mindset. And for many, though the minority now, I think, that still is the mindset.

 

Flight 93 is a perfect example.

 

Even when, I think, most of us would have gone ahead and ordered Flight 93 shot down, sacrificing the passengers on board (who were likely going to die anyway) to save potentially thousands of lives, the American government denies it shot that aircraft down. Many of the public, I believe the vast majority Bush-supporting Republicans, won't even entertain the notion that the aircraft was shot down. Not even in scenario such as that which transpired on the 11th of November 2001 do they believe it could have happened.

 

Without even going over the clues to flight 93 having been shot down, and there is some strong evidence to suggest it was, anyone even suggesting it was shot down is shouted down as a crank or a conspiracy theorist.

 

And there are numerous other examples of the US government fucking over its own people, but for many, many Americans there just isn't any possible way their government, and by extension the American people, could ever do anything that isn't entirely altruistic.

 

11th of November 2001?

 

Pedantry asides, you're on the button. Thing is, its not like this hasn't been debated to death. The real question is - How do you get it back into public awareness and how do we re-engage the truth? Not talking about this incident, the other one, that eventually died in Tripoli.

[Ke1t]

What kind of evidence is available, out of curiosity, to suggest it was deliberately shot down?

 

 

I'd point,in particular, to eyewitness reports who claim to have seen jets in the area at the time, before and after the incident with Flight 93. Not least the mayor of Shanksville saying he knows there were military jets in the area at the time of the crash.

 

Calls made from the plane, the recording of one in particular which has been confiscated by the FBI, reporting an explosion.

 

The claim that Flight 93 had a bomb on board, hence the explosion, although there's no evidence that any of the other hijacked aircraft were carrying bombs. The aircraft themselves were being used as weapons, rather than explosives being used to destroy the aircraft. It would be somewhat coincidental that the remaining plane, still airborne after the events in New York and Washington, would just happen to have a bomb on board to explain away an explosion, rather than having been shot down by military jets.

[Terrorfex]

I'd point,in particular, to eyewitness reports who claim to have seen jets in the area at the time, before and after the incident with Flight 93. Not least the mayor of Shanksville saying he knows there were military jets in the area at the time of the crash.

 

Calls made from the plane, the recording of one in particular which has been confiscated by the FBI, reporting an explosion.

 

The claim that Flight 93 had a bomb on board, hence the explosion, although there's no evidence that any of the other hijacked aircraft were carrying bombs. The aircraft themselves were being used as weapons, rather than explosives being used to destroy the aircraft. It would be somewhat coincidental that the remaining plane, still airborne after the events in New York and Washington, would just happen to have a bomb on board to explain away an explosion, rather than having been shot down by military jets.

 

I'm quite prepared to believe there were military aircraft in the area; numerous CAPs (Combat Air Patrols) were launched once it became clear the second impact into the WTC was no coincidence. I'm not at all convinced that there's any technical evidence that supports United 93 doing anything other than hitting terra firma of its own accord.

 

The Flight Data Recorder records technical data regarding the aircraft in flight. It measures a huge number of variables; height, airspeed, engine power levels, thrust, control surface commands, secondary flight system configurations (flaps, spoilers, etc).

 

In other words, it's watching what the aircraft is doing not only in regards to the pilot inputs, but external factors as well. If a headwind reduces overall airspeed, for example, that'll be reflected on the FDR.

 

The FDR recorded all systems as operating normally until United 93 smacked into Terra Firma. It recorded the nose-down input from the flight column, and it recorded the elevator positions that caused the nose-down attitude which led to the crash.

 

The defining characteristic of an air-to-air missile, or a chin-mounted gun, is it tends to cause damage. It tends to rip things off, shred things, or otherwise smash sh*t up.

 

If United 93 had been shot down, the FDR would have recorded progressive system failures and / or malfunctions as damage progressed from a hypothetical missile / gun impact. Since the FDR measures functionality over time, the fact that all function was retained until moment of impact means that United 93 being shot down isn't supported.

 

Throw in the Cockpit Voice Recorder, which would almost certainly have included some sort of reference to being thrown about the cockpit as imagined missiles struck home or gatling guns raked the fuselage, and I don't see there's any real evidence other than speculation that suggests anything different.

 

The wreckage distribution is entirely consistent with the aircraft being intact up to impact. An in-flight break-up (which is the only real possibility if the aircraft suffers a missile strike) distributes the remains of the aircraft over an extremely wide area. In this case, wreckage was confined to an area circular to the impact point; suggesting the aircraft was in one piece.

 

It's not even plausible to suggest the CVR/FDR were somehow altered to "cover-up" the truth.

 

In the entire history of on-board recording of flight characteristics, there's never, ever been even the possibility raised (during any crash) that the FDR or CVR could possibly have been tampered with.

 

Firstly, you simply can't tamper with the CVR: to change what's on it, you'd have to somehow pull new lines of dialogue from the people recorded on the tape from thin air. Secondly, the U.S. Government (as evidenced by 9/11) had no idea who any of these hijackers were - to attempt to pull new dialogue from people recorded on a tape whose identity you've no idea of from thin air is sheer nonsense. A contributing reason is also that the CVR (and FDR) fitted to that aircraft, and most aircraft, are magnetic reel recorders - effectively like giant VHS tapes and anyone whose ever known anyone in the tape editing business will know how supremely difficult it is to edit those tapes and produce anything that isn't gibberish. Throw in the CVR records on a thirty minute loop, and you've got to get your new edit bang on or even the slightest "hiccup" will make your edit laughably obvious.

 

 

It's worth pointing out that another highly politicised, famous aircraft accident - KAL 007. In this case, it was in the absolute best interests of the USSR to doctor the Flight Recorders to support their case. That they didn't - or couldn't - despite the major embarrassment caused should be enough to confirm that United 93's recorders give an accurate interpretation of events.

 

I'm more than willing to consider any technical evidence that disputes this, if it can be found.

[Ke1t]

Well now, that's a lot of information right there.

 

I'm of the mind that there's no such thing as 'tamperproof', and hold a great deal of skepticism any time I'm told something is 100% secure. I routinely set up 128/256bit WEP and WAP2 encryption on wireless networks, I forget the exact formula for determining the decrypt combinations, but it's likely in the hundreds of billions. Needless to say, that's pretty 'tamperproof' by any stretch of the imagination. It took a team of Scandinavian pot-heads about two weeks to crack 256bit encryption, using their own computers and a steady supply of pizza and Red Bull. Their resources, compared to a those available to, say, the American government, are completely insignificant, and primitive. Just because something is generally believed to be very, very difficult to do is by no means definitive proof that it is impossible to do.

 

Now I've no doubt that to all intents and purposes the Voice Recorder is '100% tamperproof', however I've equally no doubts that 21st century governmental resources, particularly those available to the American government in 2001, are exponentially more sophisticated than those that might have been available to the Russian government in 1983, when the Atari 2600 was some cutting edge technology.

 

I'm not suggesting the Voice Recorder was tampered with, however, I'm expressing cynicism towards any claim that something is so impenetrable as to be uncrackable, untamperproof, or otherwise immune from manipulation.

 

The Titanic, I'm sure you remember, was unsinkable.

 

While It's not even plausible to suggest the CVR/FDR were somehow altered to "cover-up" the truth, it's equally implausible to suggest a team of hackers can decrypt your WAP2 signal. Things that are implausible have a habit of occurring. I've worked in technology for close to 20 years, and have I the first inkling of how you would even go about hacking an encrypted system? Nope. Does that mean it can't be done? Equally nope.

 

In the words of Darth Vader, “Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.” An X-Wing, armed with a couple of torpedos was able to take out "The Ultimate Power in the Universe"...

 

I'll throw two phone calls into the mix, pertaining to flight 93.

 

One was from Cee Cee someoneorother, who called her husband to tell him the flight had been hijacked and that she wanted him to tell their kids she loved them.

 

Another, reported in the media at the time...tv news reports which you can still view online... come from a guy who calls 911 to tell them the flight has been hijacked, and that there was an explosion.

 

It has been said that the guy who called 911 couldn't have made the 911 call, because the signal from the cell phone towers don't reach aircraft. Ergo it must have been an elaborate hoax. The Cee Cee call, however, is accepted as real, despite her presumably suffering the same limitations as the 911 caller.

 

This is to lose the point of my original post, however.

 

Whether or not Flight 93 was or wasn't shot down isn't the point. (and I remain unconvinced, despite your very well detailed response re the Voice Recorder), the point is that even if the government HAD shot down Flight 93 (which I think was a logical action for them to take) there would remain a large section of the American public who would remain wholly unconvinced that such an act did, or could, be perpetrated by the American government, based entirely on their unshakable belief that the American government is incapable of such an action.

[Terrorfex]

Well now, that's a lot of information right there.

 

I'm of the mind that there's no such thing as 'tamperproof', and hold a great deal of skepticism any time I'm told something is 100% secure. I routinely set up 128/256bit WEP and WAP2 encryption on wireless networks, I forget the exact formula for determining the decrypt combinations, but it's likely in the hundreds of billions. Needless to say, that's pretty 'tamperproof' by any stretch of the imagination. It took a team of Scandinavian pot-heads about two weeks to crack 256bit encryption, using their own computers and a steady supply of pizza and Red Bull. Their resources, compared to a those available to, say, the American government, are completely insignificant, and primitive. Just because something is generally believed to be very, very difficult to do is by no means definitive proof that it is impossible to do.

 

Now I've no doubt that to all intents and purposes the Voice Recorder is '100% tamperproof', however I've equally no doubts that 21st century governmental resources, particularly those available to the American government in 2001, are exponentially more sophisticated than those that might have been available to the Russian government in 1983, when the Atari 2600 was some cutting edge technology.

 

I'm not suggesting the Voice Recorder was tampered with, however, I'm expressing cynicism towards any claim that something is so impenetrable as to be uncrackable, untamperproof, or otherwise immune from manipulation.

 

The Titanic, I'm sure you remember, was unsinkable.

 

While It's not even plausible to suggest the CVR/FDR were somehow altered to "cover-up" the truth, it's equally implausible to suggest a team of hackers can decrypt your WEP2 signal. Things that are implausible have a habit of occurring. I've worked in technology for close to 20 years, and have I the first inkling of how you would even go about hacking an encrypted system? Nope. Does that mean it can't be done? Equally nope.

 

In the words of Darth Vader,

[granite sheep]

With regard to the original post, what beggars belief is that the radar crews mistook a F-14 for an airliner, something with a far greater RCS (Radar Cross Section), and that they didn't think to have some sort of interceptor jets on station to have a closer look. Those should have been the ones to bring down any hostiles, not Captain Pugwash and his trigger happy missile crews.

[Ke1t]

I do agree with your last point; I'm certainly only "arguing" from the point of technical evidence and then again, only because it's my particular field. You're right enough that it's not impossible to synthesise or alter a recording. The greater issue I see is that it's much, much more difficult to get it then to marry up to the FDR which for all intents and purposes, is much, much tougher to "forge" because it's a collection of data inputs measured against a specific time base. I think that, in combination with the debris scattering, released ATC transcripts and other data on the balance of probability United 93 wasn't shot down.

 

Certainly aviation isn't my field of expertise, or even a field I find moderately interesting insofar as its technical aspects are concerned... though I might clap like an excited retard if the Red Arrows buzz me on Union Street like they did when I was a kid... in fact the only real emotion I feel towards aviation is one of stark terror any time I board a commercial airliner.

 

Having said that, my mindset is automatic cynicism to pretty much everything I'm told . So when I'm told, "Nothing can possibly go wrong." I'm sitting waiting for the aircraft's wings to catch fire or for the boat's hull to spring a leak.

 

If something exists it can, to one extent or another, be manipulated. Of that I have no doubt. I can understand your faith in the improbability of an altered Flight Recorder, but never share it, in the same way a software engineer can have faith in the uncrackability of his code, right up until someone hacks it and steals all the credit card information on his database. Even if I hadn't known of the Scandinavians hacking 256bit encrypt, I'd have expected it to have happened but simply not mentioned by those who did it.

 

 

 

That's not to say any number of other conspiracy theories might be right, after all. I just don't believe in this particular one.

 

Here's a link to a report from the Philly Daily News in 2002, which may interest you. I would be interested to hear your take on it. I honestly don't know if there has been an update on it, but the parts I found to be of interest from a layman's point of view relate to the three minute gap, and the potential for an electrical failure resulting in the recording shutting down and the plane hitting the dirt.

 

What would be the potential impact on the recording if the aircraft suffered an immediate loss of all electrical power.

 

3 minutes

[Ke1t]

11th of November 2001?

 

Pedantry asides, you're on the button. Thing is, its not like this hasn't been debated to death. The real question is - How do you get it back into public awareness and how do we re-engage the truth? Not talking about this incident, the other one, that eventually died in Tripoli.

 

I meant September

 

I think what happened is that I was so traumatised, sitting there in the office watching the TV reports... and actually seeing... the (second) aircraft smashing into the WTC, that I can't even bring myself to remember the date

 

Joking aside, there must have been 50 of us sitting in the conference room glued to the TV, and the hysteria from the yanks was just fucking ridiculous.

 

My wife was downtown in the GM building (Ren Center), a huge, sitting target to any passing hijacked commercial airliner.

 

 

She called me at the time of the attacks, literally* pissing herself with fear, telling me everyone was gtfo of the building before the planes came for them.

 

I tried calming her down, telling her she was merely being a hysterical American... which is exactly what she was... and that the chances of the planes coming for her were astronomically low.

 

I'm disappointed to say she hung up and joined the stampede out of the building.

 

I must have told 200 different people to pull themselves the fuck together that day.

 

*Of course I mean practically, but I prefer the sound of literally.

 

[granite sheep]

Fuck, I was shitting maself on the big day, even more so cos I was at the work and we were all listening on the radio. Suffice to say, when I got home and saw the news.......fucking and hell were my first two words.... Followed by frenzied shagging of the bird at the time cos I was convinced it was the balloon goin up, WW III and all that.

[Ke1t]

Fuck, I was shitting maself on the big day, even more so cos I was at the work and we were all listening on the radio. Suffice to say, when I got home and saw the news.......fucking and hell were my first two words.... Followed by frenzied shagging of the bird at the time cos I was convinced it was the balloon goin up, WW III and all that.

 

Have to say the only two calm people I saw that day were me and the English guy who worked in the same office. I've never seen anything like the mass hysteria displayed that day.

 

Yanks tend towards over-emotional, hysterical nonsense at the best of times, but during an actual crisis like September 11 (yay... got the date right) it was like watching a classroom full of 7 year old loons who'd been told they had to go visit Nurse Glitter for their Cough Test.

 

I think I spent most of that day annoyed as fuck rather than scared.

[granite sheep]

Ach, at least the missus enjoyed the attention, nowt like an apocalypse to get the man juices flowing

[Terrorfex]

Certainly aviation isn't my field of expertise, or even a field I find moderately interesting insofar as its technical aspects are concerned... though I might clap like an excited retard if the Red Arrows buzz me on Union Street like they did when I was a kid... in fact the only real emotion I feel towards aviation is one of stark terror any time I board a commercial airliner.

 

Having said that, my mindset is automatic cynicism to pretty much everything I'm told . So when I'm told, "Nothing can possibly go wrong." I'm sitting waiting for the aircraft's wings to catch fire or for the boat's hull to spring a leak.

 

If something exists it can, to one extent or another, be manipulated. Of that I have no doubt. I can understand your faith in the improbability of an altered Flight Recorder, but never share it, in the same way a software engineer can have faith in the uncrackability of his code, right up until someone hacks it and steals all the credit card information on his database. Even if I hadn't known of the Scandinavians hacking 256bit encrypt, I'd have expected it to have happened but simply not mentioned by those who did it.

 

 

Here's a link to a report from the Philly Daily News in 2002, which may interest you. I would be interested to hear your take on it. I honestly don't know if there has been an update on it, but the parts I found to be of interest from a layman's point of view relate to the three minute gap, and the potential for an electrical failure resulting in the recording shutting down and the plane hitting the dirt.

 

What would be the potential impact on the recording if the aircraft suffered an immediate loss of all electrical power.

 

3 minutes

 

Off the top of my head, there are three explanations for a"missing" three minutes from the CVR:

 

• 
   
  
• Whomever transcribed the CVR bollocked up the timestamping, so that there's no actual missing three minutes: the times are incorrect by three minutes. This one is the easiest to prove or disprove; by listening to ATC recordings of conversations between ground and United 93 - both pre and post-hijacking - the times can be synced.
  
• The missing three minutes exist, but have never been released for INSERT SHADY REASON HERE.
  
• The CVR lost power, and recording ended three minutes prior to impact.
   
  

 

Discounting that the three missing minutes are being sat on by evil men, because that's not for me to say, that leaves two. The first is possible; certainly CVR transcripts in the past have been incorrectly timestamped but this hasn't usually been an issue as the time of the recording being accurate isn't usually absolutely vital to the investigation. There's a lot of talk of the FBI in some of the articles I've read, but it's the NTSB that transcribe CVRs - the FBI don't have the equipment or no-how to do it.

 

Number three is possible in a multitude of scenarios. Neither recorders are powered by the aircraft's battery in the event of a dual-engine failure (for twinjets) so if the aircraft's APU isn't started, the recorders will go off-line along with all other non-essential systems. However, it's very unlikely this happened - simply because we know the FDR (Flight Data Recorder) continued to record all telemetry from United 93 until data stopped being sent (at the moment of impact). If there was power for the FDR there was almost certainly power for the CVR, so again on the balance of probability we can conclude the aircraft didn't suffer a complete power failure.

 

However, that's not to say the CVR didn't lose power independently. In the cockpit you'll find a panel, usually behind the Captain (Left hand seat) which contains the aircraft's circuit breakers. There's one each for the CVR and the FDR. It's possible that during the battle between Hijacker and passengers, these breakers were tripped (they'll pop when pushed). In the past, Hijackers (and disgruntled employees - see FedEx Express Flight 705 ) have deliberately turned off the CVR by popping the breaker; preventing the recorder from operating.

 

I notice that your link also mentions the "wide" debris field, but qualifies it by saying "Paper found (distance) away." I think that needs to be measured against the fact that an energetic event like a large, fuelled airliner impacting the ground at high speed will generate a force more than capable of throwing some very heavy debris (and anything lighter) a considerable distance away. It's the pattern of debris, rather than solely the distance of the debris, that's most important in determining the structural integrity of the aircraft just prior to collision.

 

So really, there remains the chance any possible permutation of those "Missing three minutes" is true. It's just a matter of what's plausible, or likely and from my point of view, it's less likely the (U.S.) government have them and they're just not telling anyone.

[granite sheep]

Still think Paul Greengrass's movie "United 93" gives the best (assumed)account of what happened aboard the titular plane. As for USAF planes flying CAP and shooting it down, christ knows.

 

But for the best parody of what happened on 9/11- anyone here read "The Boys" by Garth Ennis, that's how in a world full of [amateur] superheroes, how it'd go down..