Amid tensions from the Iran–Iraq War, the American cruiser USS Vincennes misidentified Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian Airbus A300 climbing on a routine scheduled route, as an attacking F-14 fighter. The ship fired two surface-to-air missiles, destroying the aircraft and killing all 290 passengers and crew, including 66 children. The U.S. later paid compensation but never formally apologized.
Flight 655 had taken off from Bandar Abbas bound for Dubai, a fourteen-minute hop across the Strait of Hormuz that hundreds of flights had made safely before. The Vincennes was engaged in a running gun battle with Iranian gunboats that morning, and its crew, working with an Aegis radar system still new to combat conditions, misread the airliner's transponder codes and altitude data, convincing themselves it was a descending, accelerating military jet on an attack profile.
It was neither descending nor accelerating in any threatening way — investigators later found it was climbing steadily on its assigned commercial flight path, squawking a civilian transponder code the entire time. Captain Will Rogers III ordered the missiles fired with only seconds of decision time, a judgment call made amid the chaos and adrenaline of an actual firefight already underway.
All 290 people aboard died, wreckage and bodies scattered across the Gulf. The U.S. Navy initially defended the shootdown as a reasonable response to a perceived threat, and Vincennes crew members later received commendations, a decision that embittered Iranians for years. Washington eventually paid $61.8 million in compensation through the International Court of Justice without admitting legal liability. Some analysts have argued the tragedy hardened Iranian mistrust of the United States for a generation.