Iran said that the misalignment of an air defense unit’s radar system was the key “human error” that led to the accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger plane in January.
“A failure occurred due to a human error in following the procedure” for aligning the radar, causing a “107-degree error” in the system, the Iranian Civil Aviation Organisation (CAO) said in a report on Sunday.
This error “initiated a hazard chain” that saw further errors committed in the minutes before the plane was shot down, said the CAO document.
The document was presented as a “factual report” and not as the final report on the accident investigation.
The CAO said that, despite the erroneous information available to the radar system operator on the aircraft’s trajectory, he could have identified his target as an airliner, but instead there was a “wrong identification.”
The report also noted that the first of the two missiles launched at the aircraft was fired by a defense unit operator who had acted “without receiving any response from the Coordination Center” on which he depended.
The second missile was fired 30 seconds later, “by observing the continuity of trajectory of the detected target,” the report added, AFP reported.
Flight 752, a Ukraine International Airlines jetliner, was struck by two missiles and crashed shortly after taking off from Tehran’s main airport on January 8, at a time of heightened US-Iranian tensions.
The IRGC said three days later that they accidentally shot down the Kiev-bound plane, killing all 176 people on board.
