Iran Air Flight 655 - The Shooting Down of Flight 655

The Shooting Down of Flight 655

The plane, an Airbus A300B2, registered as EP-IBU and flown by Captain Mohsen Rezaian, a veteran pilot with 7,000 hours of flight time, left Bandar Abbas at 10:17 am Iran time (UTC +03:30), 27 minutes after its scheduled departure time. It should have been a 28-minute flight. After takeoff, it was directed by the Bandar Abbas tower to turn on its transponder and proceed over the Persian Gulf. The flight was assigned routinely to commercial air corridor Amber 59, a twenty-mile (32 km)-wide lane on a direct line to Dubai airport. The short distance made for a simple flight pattern: climb to 14,000 feet (4,300 m), cruise for a short time, and descend into Dubai. The airliner was transmitting a friend-or-foe identification code for a civilian aircraft and maintained English-speaking radio contact with civil flight control.

On the morning of 3 July, the Vincennes, Captain William C. Rogers III commanding, was passing through the Strait of Hormuz returning from an escort duty. A helicopter from the USS Vincennes received small arms fire from Iranian patrol vessels, as it observed from high altitude. The Vincennes moved to engage the Iranian vessels, in the course of which they all violated Omani waters and left after being challenged and ordered to leave by a Royal Navy of Oman warship. The Vincennes then pursued the Iranian gunboats, entering Iranian territorial waters to open fire. The USS Sides and USS Elmer Montgomery were nearby. Thus, the USS Vincennes was in Iranian territorial waters at the time of the incident, as admitted by the U.S. government in legal briefs and publicly by Admiral William Crowe on Nightline. However, Admiral Crowe denied a U.S. government coverup of the incident and claimed that the USS Vincennes's helicopter was in international waters initially, when it was first fired upon by the Iranian gunboats.

Contrary to the memories of various USS Vincennes crewmembers, the Iranian airliner was ascending (not descending, as an attacking fighter aircraft might) at the time and its radio transmitter was "squawking" on the Mode III (civilian and military) code (rather than on the purely military Mode II), as recorded by the USS Vincennes own shipboard Aegis combat system.

After receiving no response to multiple radio challenges, the USS Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles at the airliner, destroying it and killing all aboard.

The event triggered an intense international controversy, with Iran condemning the U.S. attack as a "barbaric act." In mid-July 1988, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati asked the United Nations Security Council to condemn the United States saying the U.S. attack "could not have been a mistake" and was a "criminal act," an "atrocity" and a "massacre." George H. W. Bush, at the time Vice President of the United States in the Reagan administration, defended his country at the United Nations by arguing that the U.S. attack had been a wartime incident and that the crew of the Vincennes had acted appropriately to the situation. The Soviet Union asked the U.S. to withdraw from the area and supported efforts by the Security Council to end the Iran-Iraq war. The remainder of the 13 delegates who spoke supported the U.S. position, saying one of the problems was that a 1987 resolution to end the Iran-Iraq war had been ignored. Following the debate, Security Council Resolution 616 was passed expressing "deep distress" over the U.S. attack, "profound regret" for the loss of human lives, and stressed the need to end the Iran-Iraq war as resolved in 1987.