“Even in the statement of Iran there is a hint that our crew was acting independently, or that it could act differently,” the airline’s director, Yevhenii Dykhne,said. “Unfortunately, we have to acknowledge that our plane was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This could have been any plane.”
The crew received had no warning before leaving Tehran, the officials said. The plane took off as Ukrainian flights from Iran had dozens of times before, and followed the same departure routes as airliners leaving that night, Igor Sosnovsky, the airline’s vice president for flight operations, told journalists. “There was no deviation from any routes that some are hinting at,” he added.
The crew maintained normal radio contact with the tower in Tehran, he said, and followed a standard departure procedure for the airport. After reaching an elevation of 6,000 feet, the pilots were instructed to make a slight northerly turn. In the last communication, he said, one pilot simply read back this instruction from the tower, saying, “Turn and climb.”
Addressing criticism that the airline should not have sent a plane to Iran at all, in light of tensions in the region, the officials said it was Iran’s responsibility to close airspace if it intended to fire missiles.
There was also veiled criticism of the Iranian investigation, which the Ukrainians have been reluctant to discuss while their team is on the ground in Iran. Mr. Dykhne, the airline director, said, “we have noticed some oddities and irregularities.”
There was no immediate reaction from the United States to Iran’s admission, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had been the first American official to publicly confirm the intelligence assessments.
“We do believe that it’s likely that the plane was shot down by an Iranian missile,” Mr. Pompeo said at a briefing at the White House announcing new sanctions against Iran on Friday.