The biggest question surrounding the downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 will not be answered by the contents of its black box.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada recently announced it has completed a preliminary analysis of the plane’s cockpit voice and flight data recorders.
But that analysis is unlikely to offer insight into the tragedy’s central mystery: Why was the plane ever allowed to leave the ground?
Iran’s military was on its highest alert level on the morning of Jan. 8 when the plane was brought out of the sky by two missiles fired in error from a defence battery.
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Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ airspace unit, has said an operator mistook the plane for a cruise missile. The country’s military had been warned that a U.S. cruise missile attack had been launched in response to Iran’s revenge attack earlier that morning for the drone strike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani.
The operator, Hajizadeh told a news conference , had only 10 seconds in which to respond to what he believed was a missile attack. The plane was on its normal flight path, he added, and its pilots made no mistake.
What Hajizadeh failed to explain was why civilian aircraft were still flying at a time when the country was anticipating a major U.S. attack, and when its defence forces were in a state of readiness for all-out war.
Civilian airspace is normally cleared on such occasions.
“Because there is a fight, they should have ground all the commercial airplanes,” said Ottawa’s Masoud Pourjam, the brother of one of those killed on PS752. “This is the biggest crime.”
It’s also hard to understand why PS752 was targeted since it was not the first flight to leave Tehran’s airport that morning.
The New York Times has established that PS752 was the ninth passenger flight that took off from Imam Khomeini International Airport airport on the morning of Jan. 8 — in the hours after Iran’s ballistic missile strike on U.S. bases. Another 10 commercial flights left the airport after the downing of PS752 without incident.
Iranian officials, too, have yet to address why the passenger plane was hit with a second ground-to-air missile 23 seconds after the first one. The airplane was much bigger and slower moving than any cruise missile.
In a recent news release, TSB Chair Kathy Fox said the agency is advocating for a “thorough, transparent and credible safety investigation,” and continues to offer its assistance to Iran, which is leading the probe. “There are still many key questions that need to be answered,” she said.
Pourjam said he suspects the flight may have been deliberately brought down by the Iranian regime in the belief that it could be blamed on U.S. cruise missiles. Pourjam’s brother, Mansour, 53, was killed in the incident.
“There are a lot of flaws in this story so far,” he said. “We really can’t rest until we get to the bottom of this and the truth comes out. There’s a big question mark in my heart and mind.”
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