An Iran Air Flight 655 (AR 655) was shot down by naval vessel Vincennes on July 3 in the Persian Gulf, 1988 killing all 290 people aboard.
66 children were also killed in the US attack.
There were 38 non-Iranians aboard.
The US Vessel was 4 kilometers inside the borders of Iran when it hit the plane with a missile killing all 274 passengers and 16 crew members.The men of the US naval vessel Vincennes which attacked the Iranian Passenger Air Plane, were all awarded combat-action ribbons. Lustig, the air-warfare co-ordinator, won the navy's Commendation Medal for "heroic achievement," noting his "ability to maintain his poise and confidence under fire" that enabled him to "quickly and precisely complete the firing procedure." The Legion of Merit was presented to Rogers(who fired the missile on the passenger airplane) and Lustig on 3 July 1988, according to a 23 April 1990 article in The Washington Post. The citations did not mention the Iran Air flight. It should be noted that the Legion of Merit is often awarded to high-ranking officers upon successful completion of especially difficult duty assignments and/or last tours of duty before retirement.
The civilian jet was hit by two SM-2MR Surface-to-air missiles. The first missile broke the aircraft in two and damaged the tailplane and right wing.
Three years after the incident, Admiral William J. Crowe admitted on American television show Nightline that the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters when it launched the missiles. This contradicted earlier Navy claims.
The U.S. government issued notes of regret for the loss of human life but never admitted wrongdoing, accepted responsibility, nor apologised for the incident.
Officially, the bloody US government continues to blame Iranian hostile actions for the incident.
According to the Iranian government, the shooting down of IR 655 by the Vincennes was an intentionally performed and unlawful act. Even if there was a mistaken identification, which Iran does not accept, this amounted to such gross negligence and recklessness that it still amounted to an international crime, not an accident. In April 1988, the US Navy carried out Operation Praying Mantis against Iran and directly attacked Iranian Naval vessels and installations and Iranian off-shore oil facilities. In effect, Iran and the USA were in outright military conflict. Iran thus regarded the USA as being an open military ally of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and feared that the US would expand its naval war with Iran into attacks on Iran's soil. The Iranian government believed at the time of the incident that the attack was intended as a warning to Iran that if it did not agree to some form of armistice with Iraq, the USA would itself directly attack the Iranian mainland and Iranian civilians in order to assist Iraq.
Tenefire Plane Crash
The Tenerife disaster is considered as the deadliest air crash.
The Tenerife disaster took place on March 27, 1977, at 17:06:56 local time, when two Boeing 747 airliners collided at Los Rodeos Airport on the island of Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, killing 583 people.
The accident has the highest number of fatalities in the aviation history.
The probable cause, cited by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA, 1978), was the KLM pilot taking off without takeoff clearance.
A miscommunication between the pilot and the air traffic controller is considered to be a major contributing factor of the accident.
As a matter of fact neither plane should have been at Los Rodeos in the first place, which was not used to handling the traffic it had that day. They should have been in Gran Canaria, but a terrorist bomb attack by Canary Island separatists, The Canary Islands Independence Movement, closed the airport there.
Analysis of the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) transcript showed that the KLM pilot was convinced that he had been cleared for take-off, while the Tenerife control tower was certain that the KLM 747 was stationary at the end of the runway and awaiting takeoff clearance.
All 234 passengers and 14 crew members in the KLM plane were killed, and 326 passengers and 9 crew members aboard the Pan Am flight perished in the collision, primarily due to the fire and explosions resulting from the fuel spilled in the impact.
Fifty-six passengers and 5 crewmembers aboard the Pan Am aircraft survived, including the Captain, First Officer, and Flight Engineer.
Most of the survivors on the Pan Am aircraft were able to walk out onto the left wing through holes in the fuselage structure.
Survivors waited for rescue, but it didn't come promptly as the firefighters were initially unaware that there were two aircraft involved and were concentrating on the KLM wreck some distance away in the thick fog. Eventually, most of the survivors on the wings jumped to the ground below. The only member of the KLM passenger manifest to avoid the disaster was Robina van Lanschot, a travel guide who lived on Tenerife and elected not to reboard the 747 when it was due to depart.
Egypt Air Flight 990 Plane Crash
Flight 990 was a Los Angeles-New York-Cairo flight operated by EgyptAir. On October 31, 1999, at around 1:50 a.m. EST, Flight 990 dove into the Atlantic Ocean, about 60 miles south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, killing all 217 people on board.There were 14 members of crew on the flight and 203 pessengers from seven countries abord in Flight 990, none of them survived.
Radar and radio contact with the Boeing 767-366ER aircraft was lost 30 minutes after the aircraft departed JFK Airport in New York on its flight to Cairo. The flight departed from its assigned altitude (FL330: 33,000 feet) and dove to 16,000 feet, then climbed again to 24,000 then continued to dive, hitting the Atlantic Ocean within the span of 36 seconds.
Flight data showed that the flight controls were used to move the elevators in order to initiate and sustain the steep dive. Forces on the captain's and first officer's control columns were recorded and completely consistent with the recorded elevator deflections and a struggle for control of the aircraft. There were no other aircraft in the area. There was no indication that an explosion occurred on board. The engines operated normally for the entire flight until they shut down and the left engine was torn from the wing from the stress of the maneuvers.
An investigation by the NTSB determined that the relief first officer, Gameel Al-Batouti, at the controls while the captain was out of the cockpit, turned off the autopilot, and deliberately crashed the plane into the ocean.
While investigation made in Egypt deny's NTSB's point of view. There was some functional problem in the plane and Al-Batouti was trying to resolve it.
However, The crash of flight 990 of Egypt Air still remains a mystery after so many years.
Aeroflot Flight 593 Plane Crash
The air crash incident of the flight 593 of Aeroflot pessenger airliner is only one of its kind. The crash of the flight 593 happened because the pilot let his 15 year old son sit on the controls of the plane.It was on March 23, 1994 that an Aeroflot Airbus passenger airliner crashed into a hillside in Siberia, Killing all 63 passengers and 12 crew members.
The cockpit voice recorder revealed that the pilot's 15-year-old son, Eldar Kudrinsky, was initially at the controls when the incident began, and that he had unknowingly activated an automatic feature of the A310's autopilot that many pilots at the time were unfamiliar with.
There were 75 people aboard, none of them survived the crash.
The pilot, Yaroslav Kudrinsky, was taking his two children on their first international flight and they were brought to the cockpit while he was on duty. With the autopilot active, Kudrinksy, against regulations, offered to let them sit at the controls. First his daughter took the pilot's left front seat. Kudrinsky adjusted the autopilot's heading to give her the impression that she was turning the plane, though she actually had no control of the plane. Next, his son Eldar took the pilot's seat. Unlike his sister, Eldar applied enough force to the steering column to contradict the autopilot for 30 seconds.
A recovery procedure that the pilots were not made aware of on the A310 was that, had their hands been taken off the controls during the stall, the plane would have taken its own corrective action to recover.
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