JTN
Two U.S. Navy pilots were shot down Sunday by one of their own ships in what military officials said was a friendly fire incident over the Red Sea during an operation against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels.
Both pilots ejected from their F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet and were recovered safely, with one suffering minor injuries, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said.
“The guided missile cruiser USS Gettysburg, which is part of the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group, mistakenly fired on and hit the F/A-18, which was flying off the USS Harry S. Truman,” CENTCOM said in a statement. more
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Inexcusable.
HEY! That’s MY old job!!!
Pentagon sending DEI coverup team to the Red Sea to “investigate.”
Or was it? I suspect rag-head fire brought it down and the FF story is just an excuse. We’ll soon know… if the commander of that ship isn’t fired….
They have to REPLACE those!
Cha-CHING!!!
Too bad they can’t shoot down DRONES as well.
Maybe it was frenree fire…
No plausible excuse for incompetence on a war ship.
At the least the Fire Control Officer will be replaced, demoted and their career is toast.
They didn’t die, but they were DEI-ed.
It wouldn’t be a shipboard failure if the aircraft pilot neglected to squawk IFF.
If the IFF / radar transponder had been shut off for stealth, the pilot might have failed to reactivate it when back among friends.
In addition to Uncle Al’s comment. They’re in pretty “hot” territory, the Houthis have been tossing anti-ship missiles like they’re going out of style. They’re likely leaving the Aegis system in “suggest mode”, where the computer highlights unidentified contacts flying towards the fleet and makes weapons dispatch suggestions to the operator.
Kali,…don’t they have IFF systems?
Can the Navy identify the 2 pilots, were they male or female?
@HungJumper,
Of course they have IFF. But… You don’t fly into enemy air radar with it enabled. Unless they’re flying at very low altitude, the Aegis system can paint an F-18 from probably 200+ miles. If you own ship sends an IFF query from 200 miles away, and your transponder responds while you’re in enemy airspace, the enemy system can detect the transmission and even home on it. Missile software engineers are lunatics, they’ll use any bit of radiation to home on a target. Even the UHF comms can get you lit up.
If I had to guess, the F-18 pilot didn’t re-enable IFF at some key distance, or lost situational awareness and inadvertently flew past the IFF limit, and the Aegis system marked him as a inbound high value threat, suggested an SM2 dispatch, and the CIC Office pressed the authorize button. The SM2MR block III has command guidance, but it also has active radar and an IR seeker. It’s capable of hitting a basketball size object while traveling at mach 3.5 and can pull 40+ G turns… Even if the pilot switched on his IFF after he detected the missile tracking him, it was likely in active/IR homing and would reject shipboard guidance. So you don’t get much of a chance, let alone second chances.
KR