Interview with a Russian expert of radar anti-aircraft missile systems
I have found a couple of interesting articles on the Novaya Gazeta (on their website, second article under: /articles/2020/01/11/83411-vse-taki-obezyana-s-granatoy, I don't know if I can post whole link here). They contain 2 interviews with Andrey Gorbachevsky, a Russian engineer and developper of radar anti-aircraft missile systems who worked for the Russian State Scientific Research Institute of Aviation Systems (GosNIIAS). That is: a person familiar with the Tor system.
It's clear throughout the articles that it's difficult for him to accept what happened, so much so that he says: "No one and under no circumstances could mistake a passenger plane for a cruise missile. To do that it would take not just a "monkey with a grenade", but a DRUNK "monkey with a grenade". He says the flight delay in his opinion couldn't have made any kind of difference, as "the plane took off from a civilian airfield and went along a standard track. A passenger plane cannot fly randomly, it goes along a dedicated corridor", plus "it was taking off", "that alone" would have told the crew commander (the one who gives the authorization to fire the missile, as he says, adding that without this authorization it is impossible to launch the missile) that it obviuosly was a passanger plane. He adds that after 20 seconds from take off the airplane would have been visible on the primary 'air search' radar (the TOR system has 2 radars, the second is for missile guidance) and for approximately 6 minutes it would have created a trace: so "it was clear where it was coming from" (i.e. the well-known civilian airport). He adds: the crew commander "evaluates the signal strength from the target by the magnitude of the mark (i.e. on the radar): if it's a large or small target. The indicators show a bright or dim mark. Simply put, the commander should have seen something big fly. From a large passenger plane, the mark will be ten times brighter than from a military target" (i.e. like a fighter plane). A cruise missile "has a very low reflecting power. The brightness of this point is no longer ten, but a hundred times less bright than that of a commercial airplane. And a cruise missile flies at a very low altitude, in order to avoid being detected... we are speaking about just tens of meters. And the Iranians shot down a huge plane flying at an altitude of 2400 meters. How can this be confused? The difference is where to direct the beam (i.e. for the launch): up to the sky or down along the earth".
Despite being so shocked by such an incredible 'mistake' (this shows, he says "the degree of collapse of its (=Iran's) air defense. I can't remember a bigger mistake in the history of air defense"), he concludes that the crew must have been terrified by the idea of the American raid and adds "they didn't see anything, they just took and fired".
So his take.
Edit: the radar expert says the guidance launch beam is so narrow (1 degree) that the passanger plane was aimed at (i.e. not possible that "something else" was targeted and then the missile hit it by mistake, he says). Regarding 'automated' mode for the Tor: he excludes that ("No, launching a rocket is not possible without an indication of the crew commander").
Last edited by ele; 13th Jan 2020 at 16:35.