Loss Incident
LCDR Scott Speicher was flying an F/A-18 Hornet fighter when he was shot down 100 miles west of Baghdad, on the night of January 17, 1991, the first night of Operation Desert Storm. His plane crashed in a remote, uninhabited wasteland known as Tulul ad Dulaym 33°14′35.81″N 42°21′18.14″E / 33.2432806°N 42.3550389°E / 33.2432806; 42.3550389. He was the first combat casualty for American forces in the war.
The U.S. Navy maintained in a 1997 document that Speicher was downed by a surface-to-air missile. However, an unclassified summary of a 2001 CIA report suggests that Speicher's aircraft was shot down by a missile fired from an Iraqi aircraft, most likely a MiG-25; flown by Lt. Zuhair Dawood, 84th squadron of the IQAF. Speicher was at 28,000 feet and travelling at 0.92 Mach (540 Knots) when the front of the aircraft suffered a catastrophic event. The impact from the R-40 missile threw the aircraft laterally off its flight path between fifty and sixty degrees with a resulting 6 g minimum load. A pilot on the same mission stated: "I'm telling you right now, don't believe what you're being told. It was that MiG that shot Spike down."
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