(Tehran) The “key element” behind the drama of the Ukrainian Boeing shot down on January 8 near Tehran is a “human error”, the wrong setting of a military radar having been followed by 'other malfunctions, according to a report of the Iranian Civil Aviation.
Published on 12 July 2020 at 7 a.m. 38
Marc JOURDIER
France Media Agency
That night, the Islamic Republic's air defenses were on high alert for fear of an American attack.
Iran had just attacked a base used by the American army in Iraq in missiles in response to the elimination a few days earlier, in an American drone strike in Baghdad, of General Qassem Soleimani, craftsman of Iran's regional strategy, and expected a replica of Washington.
Under these conditions, following the replacement of an air defense unit from Tehran, “there was a failure due to human error in the follow-up of the procedure” for the calibration of a radar system, writes the Iranian Civil Aviation Organization (CAO) in a report posted online Saturday night on its website.
According to the document, this led to an “error of 107 Degrees ”in the system used by the unit, no longer allowing to correctly apprehend the trajectory of objects in its field.
PHOTO EBRAHIM NOROOZI, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
“Dangerous chain”
This initial fault “is at the origin of a dangerous chain [d’évènements] which of course could have been mastered if other measures had been taken”, writes the CAD.
But according to his document, presented as a “report on the facts” and not as the final report of the investigation, other errors took place in the fatal minutes that followed.
Civil Aviation thus notes a defect in the transmission to the coordination center of defense units of data on the target identified by the radar.
An Iranian general said in January that many communications had been scrambled that night.
The CAD notes that despite the erroneous information available to it about the trajectory of the aircraft, the operator of the radar system could have identified its target as an airliner, but on the contrary, it made a mistake in the analysis and there was “misidentification”.
The report also notes that the first of the two missiles fired at the plane was fired by the operator of a defense battery “without having received a response from the coordination center On which he depended.
The second missile was fired 30 seconds later taking into account “the continuity of the trajectory of the detected target”, adds the report.
The flight PS – 752 of the company Ukraine International Airlines (UAI) connecting Tehran in Kiev was shot down on January 8 by two missiles.
PHOTO EBRAHIM NOROOZI, ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
The 176 people on board the aircraft, a Boeing 737, mostly Iranians and Canadians, but also 11 Ukrainians (including the nine crew members) perished in the disaster.
The tragedy aroused strong reprobation in Iran, especially after it had taken three days for the armed forces to admit to having shot down the plane “by mistake” after a missile battery operator l would have taken for a missile.
For months, Canada and Ukraine have been demanding that Iran send the black boxes of the device abroad so that the data can be extracted and analyzed, the Islamic Republic not having the technical means to do so.
Black boxes
At the end of June, the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) reported that Iran had officially “requested [son] technical assistance” to repair and download the data from the black boxes.
Work on the “Cockpit Voice Recorder” (CVR), which records the conversations between pilots and the noises on the plane, and the “Flight Data Recorder” (FDR), which records all the parameters of flight (speed, altitude, engine speed, trajectory, etc.), “should begin on 20 July ”, according to the BEA.
In early July, Canada announced that it had obtained an agreement in principle from Iran to launch negotiations on compensation for the families of foreign victims of the Boeing 737 from UAI.
According to Ottawa, the “coordination group” of countries whose nationals died in the crash of the PS flight 752 (Canada, United Kingdom, Ukraine, Sweden and Afghanistan), signed a “memorandum of understanding” formally paving the way for negotiations with Tehran.
