The patient made a full recovery and was discharged within three days
All of those aircraft would have been visible on the radar screen of the Tor battery as well as civilian radar at the airport.
Identifying the friendlies
A former European air defence officer, who now works on missile defence technology, said that ideally, flight plans and transponder codes of all scheduled civilian flights would be shared with military units stationed near an airport.
"Shooting down a hostile aircraft is easy," said the officer, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.
"It's identifying the aircraft and not shooting down friendlies that are the challenges."
Tor missiles are guided by radar and fly at almost three times the speed of sound. That means that if launched at a target 5 km (3 miles) away, they will arrive within about five seconds.
They have a small warhead - about 15 kg (33 lb) of high explosive - but are designed to spray fragments of shredded metal, like bullets, into a target upon detonation.
The Tor is among the most modern air defence systems Iran has, Duitsman said, and can attack two targets at once with up to two missiles each. When Iran purchased them from Russia in the mid-2000s, "the capability was such that at the time the US was concerned about the sale", he added.
Iran fields "small numbers" of Tor systems, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a report last year.
A US official told Reuters that data showed the plane was airborne for two minutes when the heat signatures of two surface-to-air missiles were detected.
That was quickly followed by an explosion in the vicinity of the plane, the official said. At least one video circulating from the night of the crash shows a burning aircraft crashing into the ground near Tehran.
The patient made a full recovery and was discharged within three days
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