Doesn’t look like a F14 either but a US warship, rather than some guys in a field, still managed to pull that off and send 290 people to their graves.
It absolutely did not. The RCS of an F-14 v/s an Airbus A300 is an order of magnitude different (probably 2 or 3 orders).
> There really was an F-14, just on the ground at an Iranian airbase
There was, but that’s a red herring for the root cause. Each ship’s radar independently and correctly identified and tracked the Airbus separate from the Mode 2 targets, but when communicating the track information between ships, the tracks were mixed up.
Source: The US Navy’s own account: https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/about-us/l...
> There was a combat camera team aboard the Vincennes, and the footage depicts considerable confusion and even ill-discipline amongst the crew (cheering, shouting, football game atmosphere) that contributed to one of the most tragic events in U.S. Navy history
I put the primary blame on Iran because they cleared a civilian plane to overfly combat they initiated. They set the situation up, a mistake happened.
Fog of war isn't like in a video game where it's just whether you can see something--in the real world by far the biggest factor is identifying what you see rather than simply seeing it.
I'm outside the US so that's probably the cause. Is such information available elsewhere?
But this also works: https://archive.md/XsxT8
And also this: https://web.archive.org/web/20251208110440/https://www.histo...