First a refresher of the Vincennes incident via Wikipedia...
On 3 July 1988, Vincennes, under the command of Captain Will Rogers III, fired two radar-guided missiles and shot down an Iran Air Airbus A300civilian airliner over Iranian airspace in the Strait of Hormuz, killing all 290 passengers and crew on board. According to Captain Rogers, they were being attacked by eight Iranian gun boats. Vincennes was defending itself from this attack when the plane was shot at with two Standard missiles. Crucially, the Vincennes misidentified the Iranian Airbus as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter aircraft. The Iran Air Flight 655 was climbing at the time and its radio transmitter was on the Mode III civilian code rather than on the purely military Mode II, as recorded by the USS Vincennes own shipboard Aegis Combat System.The above is a quick and dirty.
I highly recommend you read the official Navy history of the incident. My point? The USS Vincennes was hookin' and jabbin' against what we would call today a small boat swarm. Additionally they did not have the luxury of knowing that they would be engaged. Consider it an ambush at sea. Lastly, they picked up a radar contact that had an airplane heading there way.
Any reasonable person would assume that the Iranian Air Force was on the way to participate in the naval engagement.
Now fast forward to the events over Ukraine and I am getting a serious dose of anger over the main stream media's attempt to link the incidents.
Want a dose of cold reality?
Only an idiot would fly an airliner over an active war zone where aircraft...high performance aircraft at that...had been shot down.
Additionally one must ask why Malaysia Air Lines would be so stupid. The only thing I can come up with is to save money. More specifically to save on fuel costs.
Long story short, all these airliner shoot downs are not the same. Perhaps you could say that they were all accidental, but one thing is certain. Whoever did the shoot down in the Ukraine was not operating under the same stresses that Captain Rogers was when he gave the order to fire at the unknown bogey charging at his ship.
