My question is. Why weren't all planes grounded? Missiles going off and the plane happens to be taking off? Just happen to hit the plane as its taking off. Seems like a high margin of error for a missile to accidentally hit a plane. Why would they risk taking off if missiles are that close to the airport?
The plane wasn't hit by a rocket fired at Iraq - those missiles were long gone, as the attack took place an hour or more prior, and were likely not launched from the immediate vicinity of the airport. It appears that it was hit by an air defense missile (SA-15) that mistakenly targeted the aircraft. The hit was not some one-in-a-million coincidence between a random missile launch and the aircraft wandering into its path - it was a radar command-guided missile, so it would have been steered toward the target by the system's ground-based radar, and detonated by an onboard proximity fuse. The missile could have been accidentally fired (as in, they were tracking the target but didn't actually mean to fire the missile), or intentionally fired, presumably under the belief that the target was a hostile aircraft. Engagement times for such a system are between a couple and several seconds, so there isn't much (if any) time to recognize such a mistake and abort the engagement.
In countries such as Iran, air defense missiles are likely permanently stationed near airports, so the idea that their presence would prevent takeoff would mean that the airport would be a permanent no-go area.
Mike
