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Old 21st Mar 2006, 08:54
  #27 (permalink)  
Captain Airclues
Just another number
 
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Im afraid that I don't have time to read the USN report. However page 10 of the US Senate hearing (Sept 8th 1988) states that the AEGIS computer saw a Mode 3 squark of 6760, which was flight 655's assigned code, although the identification supervisor incorrectly reported it as 6675.
Also, on page 54 of the above report, Admiral Fogarty states that "Due to heavy pilot workload during take-off and climb-out and the requirement to communicate with both Approach Control and Teheran Center, the pilot of Iran Air flight 655 probably was not monitoring International Air Distress".
The exact wording of the radio transmissions are not given in the Senate report, only that warnings were given. However it did identify several technical problems with the radio equipment and the fact that simultaneous warnings from USS Sides could have garbled the transmission.
This was a classic case of a multitude of minor errors combining to cause an incident. It is the classic 'swiss cheese' scenario. Hopefully, if the military have an equivalent of our CRM courses then lessons will be learned so as to prevent this happening again.

Airclues
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