> The military also didn't go out of its way to punish recklessly shooting down a civilian aircraft.
It wasn't reckless: it was the right call based on the data Vincennes had, which showed that an Iranian fighter was able to kill it.
It wasn't reckless: it was the right call based on the data Vincennes had, which showed that an Iranian fighter was able to kill it.
It was, at the most generous, the right call based on the misinterpretation of that data by the crew.
I can't find conclusive evidence, but I think that's unlikely, given that the planned cruising height was 4300m (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655#Shootdown_...), and it was shot down about halfway through its flight.
I'm not sure whether using binoculars at 20km distance makes sense, though. There's quite a size difference, but even if it would be easy to spot the difference from that far away having half a minute or so to find the plane using your binoculars would be challenging (it's about a minute of flight for a passenger plane, but if it were military, you would want to hit it before it had a chance to fire a missile, and according to Wikipedia, the Maverick that they feared an Iranian F14 might carry has a range of over 12 nautical miles)