Originally Posted by
canyonblue737
its laughable to think the highest levels of the Iranian government weren’t aware of the shoot down within hours of the tragedy. It just took 3 days to calculate if there was any realistic way of hiding the reality. That the truth has come out and an apology extended is a good thing for closure but let’s go easy on the praise of any nation after they kill hundreds of defenseless civilians.
I quite agree with you
CB737 that, ultimately, it should not have happened and the apology could have been quicker. I was simply making the observation that certain other nations who, one might hope to be more “up front” in such cases are consistently as bad/worse – Moscow & Putin for example – where denial is just routine even in the light of significant/overwhelming evidence such as MH17 or Salisbury. And the Russians seem to be a lot more pre-meditated!
Given how such ME governments operate (and the fear of possible and extreme punishment that may await those who were at the LCP and in the chain of command leading away from that LCP will probably have hampered the flow of information), the “fog of war” so created no doubt added to delay in “owning up” to what I suspect was a genuine mistake. The Iranian government was probably caught completely off guard themselves. Knowing something has happened is one thing; getting heads round it is something else. But they “owned up"; the reasons for "owning up" may be cynical or otherwise – who knows what conversations were had in the upper echelons. However, to those affected, it may mean some closure at least within quite a short timescale, certainly compared to MH17.
But, it seems, one also has to ask yet more questions regarding flights generally within/over nations involved in such conflicts – particularly if there has been recent, rather obvious, provocation. That major lesson was brought out in Section 9.4 of the MH17 shoot-down Report by the Dutch; that of requiring adequate risk assessment. It's trying to define what "adequate" is which is the real problem - and I guess we'll never have it 100%. Perhaps some weighting of variables such as "robustness of chain of command" may have to be reviewed in the light of this sad event. Yet again, the fact you may be a bystander in any conflict is absolutely no guarantee of safety in a world of confusion and human fallibility! Time to dust that risk assessment criteria down again in many Airline Boardrooms?