Originally Posted by
Chronus
Of course it does. But who, but the most incompetent of the kind ...
It was far worse than incompetence, there was a callous and knowing disregard for the safety of civilians. A well known shortcoming of the Fire Dome radar on the BUK transporter/erector/launcher and radar (TELAR) vehicles is that it lacks both transponder interrogation and non-cooperative target recognition (NCTR) capabilities. NCTR is a system that can discriminate between target types even if there is no "cooperative" transponder response. The Fire Dome has a rudimentary military IFF capability that
might have been able to identify the Antonov that they were meant to be after but everything in range of the TELAR would have appeared on the radar display as a target.
They basically fired blindly into a known civilian airway against a target that could have been identified as a civilian flight with a smart-phone with a free app.