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I'm in a similar boat, being rather uneducated here. But I thought it wasn't completely unusual for countries to prod each other's air space. It seems really dangerous for Iran to just auto fire at an encroaching aircraft, potentially starting off a war. In that sense it may be lucky it wasn't a US fighter.

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Same boat here. I thought commercial flights had easily recognizable radar signatures, different from drones, fighters or cruise missiles.

Even for an automatic detection system, this should be easy to detect as "non immediate threat"

Apparently not so easily recognizable considering that the Russians shot down a Korean Air flight in 1983, the Americans shot down an Iranian flight in 1988, MH17, and now this.

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