Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Dowding on April 09, 2004, 05:45:35 AM
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Mr Riggs said the US Army claimed the RAF airmen had not turned on equipment which tells radar systems like patriot whether a plane is a friend or an enemy. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3613319.stm)
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BBC lacks a certain creditability with me, sorry :rolleyes:
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From that link it is clear that a lack of training and faulty software in the US patriot system is to blame.
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It is an American embedded journo that has made the claims.
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US journalist Robert Riggs was embedded with the Patriot unit which shot down their RAF Tornado.
He told the Today programme how the US Army responded to the incident.
"The soldiers that we talked to said that the British Tornado was identified as an enemy missile and the story that the army put out to its own soldiers in the hours after that incident was they were blaming the British flight crew."
Mr Riggs said the US Army claimed the RAF airmen had not turned on equipment which tells radar systems like patriot whether a plane is a friend or an enemy.
"But what the army never disclosed publicly at the time was that the army Patriots were mistakenly identifying friendly aircraft as enemy tactical ballistic missiles", he added.
Imagine the outrage from americans if it had been the other way round, and the British army had shot down a USAF jet.
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Furby, it definitely wasn't the first and won't be the last. The A-10 has been the worst foe of British ground troops during the last two Iraq Wars. The annoying thing is that the second time round the US had issued British troops with additional equipment so that they wouldn't be fired on. It didn't work.
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A-10 pilot #1 "hey look! down there! tanks!"
A-10 pilot #2 "Are they american?"
A-10 pilot #1 "No... KILL UM!"
A-10 pilot #2 "yeeehawww! we are the rootinest, tootinest cowboys in the wild, wild west!!"
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Blue on blue is nothing new. It happens in every war. The only new thing here are the BB-tards trying to spin this into an attack on the US.
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LMFAO! They are trying to blame america for it. It's just so whoopee funny!
If your IFF decoder is not working, YOU SHOULDN"T BE FLYING handsomehunk! This is what happens.
If it did really happen, the blame rests solely on the pilot and the ground crew.
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Hortlund... who is "BB-tards trying to spin this into an attack on the US" ?
lasersailor184... How would you know it was the brits fault?
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FF incidents are of course regretable and if anyone was negligent they should suffer the consequences.
However, doesn't that article seem to be misleading? If that aircraft wasn't responding to IFF radar interrogations what difference does it make if it were misidentifed as a missile. They would likely have still fired upon it right? Unless they had orders not to fire upon any planes which I guess is possible.
Of course the patriot crew may have believed the tracking radar had been repaired and was functioning properly too. The article itself stated that "the report" was not complete. Maybe they should have waited until it was before demanding a lynching?
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indeed the A10 has caused some serious friendly fire cases. but its not just the pilots fault. the AWACs are calling and plotting the targets. they give the final clearance to fire. as for the patroit i was in kuwait when the Brit got shot down by the missile. he wasnt the only one. we lost a plane to the same reason. the patroit works 90% of the time. the day that we went into Iraq, we had 12 Scuds launched against us, patroits only shot down 8. not good odds. theres some new equip that we now carry with us to help pilots ID us before they launch. IR strobes are one and a transmitter called the blue force tracker. they helped alot this war.
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Saddam was still launching Scuds in 2001?
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2003. I seem to remember the Iraqis lobbed a bunch of missiles into Kuwait at the beginning, not sure if they were SCUDS though.
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Listen, in every modern day plane there is an IFF coder. What you do is send a message to the plane, if it's friendly, it will send a message back.
If i'm flying over a friendly Military that's the most powerful in the world, the IFF coder is the first thing i would check.
Then I would check the ejection seat. :D
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lasersailor184l..
how do you know that the IFF transponder was not on?
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Originally posted by lasersailor184
Listen, in every modern day plane there is an IFF coder. What you do is send a message to the plane, if it's friendly, it will send a message back.
If i'm flying over a friendly Military that's the most powerful in the world, the IFF coder is the first thing i would check.
Then I would check the ejection seat. :D
I dont know who is to blame for this accident, but for sure there's nothing to have fun since someone lost his life.
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That's the point Naso. The most important thing on that plane was the IFF decoder.
Plus I think (not sure though), that some of the Patriot missile sights won't work when the IFF decoder isn't working. They only shot down one friendly that we know of. That means that there were other friendlies in the sky that weren't shot down by this site.
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No, i'm not saying they are wrong or are to blame. Crap happens in war.
However, I know that if I was in an Air Group, the IFF decoder would be the most important part of my plane.
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All radar data can be and likely was recorded. You can bet that this will be/was looked at during the investigation.
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Again lasersailor...
how do you know the transponder was not on?
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I just reread that article. It borders on dishonesty. It doesn't claim that there is a fault in that specific system but implies it. They blame the crew of that system for using it while knowing that all Patriot systems are faulty.
The US Army stated that the plane that was shot down was not transmitting an IFF signal.
This sort of manipulative bs has no other purpose than to divide. Anyone not see that?
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Originally posted by GScholz
Indeed. What I find strange is that the Patriot battery was the only platform that detected the Tornado as hostile. That is an assumption on my part, but I think other planes and SAM sites would come forward and corroborate the Patriot crew's story if the Tornado IFF was malfunctioning/switched off/wrong code.
The Tornado wasn't alone either, it was flying in formation with another aircraft.
I guess it was a faulty IFF on the F16 that got locked on too?
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What's the point of this thread again?
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Same as all threads started by the pacifists...to whine about the evil americans and/or make excuses for the terrorists...er I mean freedom fighters/partisans.
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Yeah the redundant Tampon commerical.
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I would think that there would be ALOT of allied sensors where the brits were flying (all the way form takeoff and onwards) including those that flew with the tornado. IF the patriot battery was the only system that did not register the IFF then I would guess it is to blame either by bad software or operator error. The fact that the brits were also detected as a balistic missile indicates that the brits was not at fault.
HOWEVER:.. the important thing is not to blame anyone but to find out if it was indeed the british who forgot to engage the IFF transponder, a faulty transponder or some problem with that or all patriot systems to prevent it from happening again.
Another possibility may be that the IFF transpoder code on the tornado was known only to its units and the RAF anb was for some reason not "given" to the americans. If that is the case the tornado would also have had to take off from a british controled base and have flown in british "sectors".
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Originally posted by AKIron
I just reread that article. It borders on dishonesty. It doesn't claim that there is a fault in that specific system but implies it. They blame the crew of that system for using it while knowing that all Patriot systems are faulty.
The US Army stated that the plane that was shot down was not transmitting an IFF signal.
This sort of manipulative bs has no other purpose than to divide. Anyone not see that?
Rightttt eeee ooooo that’s what I implied in my (the 2nd in this string) post. Just not enough info (facts) but a whole lot of spin and hope for blame.
Bottom line is stuff happens that is not pleasant in a war, even training people get killed, this is news?
I am sorry they were shot down, I'm very sure it was not on deliberate. Think how the battery operators feel guys.
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well said scootter
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I read this in todays newspaper:
FURY erupted on Friday night after it was revealed that US soldiers who killed an RAF crew KNEW their missile system was faulty.
The US army Patriot accidentally shot down an RAF Tornado at the beginning of the Iraq war. Pilot Flight Lieutenant David Williams and Flt Lt Kevin Main died.
US soldiers had repeatedly “locked on” to British and American warplanes by mistake yet had not fired, an inquiry revealed. On Friday night Tory defence spokesman Gerald Howarth demanded that the results of the probe should be made public.
He said: “We need to know if there is something wrong with Patriot or whether this was a one-off mistake.”
The inquiry established that the Patriot missile battery identified the Tornado as an enemy shell.
I haven't a clue how true it is but if the probe is made public then we'll all know. At least the inquiry will determine what the faults were so that they can be rectified in future.
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There will be an inquiry and hopefully any problems on either side can be identified.
It was a shooting war and mistakes can happen and people die.