https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/22/us-shoots-down-two-of-its-own-navy-pilots-over-red-sea-in-apparent-friendly-fire-incident

  • xiaohongshu [none/use name]
    ·
    17 hours ago

    Super Hornet is surprisingly stealthy in certain aspects and apparently has an RCS close to the Russian Su-57. Could be mistaken as a large drone.

    All it takes is a malfunctioning IFF and the plane getting lost and not following the pre-planned route. Large scale operations usually have planes following pre-determined ingress and egress corridors - stay within those lanes and you’d be fine, but if you wander outside you could be treated as hostile. This is how AWACS tracks who’s friendly or not, when there are dozens and dozens of assets in the air. And friendly fires like this has happened before.

    • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, comrade/them]
      ·
      16 hours ago

      If an hostile drone pops up in one of those corridors close to friendly aircraft, and it's fired upon, could it be possible for a friendly aircraft to get caught in the crossfire, with either a terminal active radar seeker or terminal infrared heat seeker locking onto the friendly aircraft instead of the hostile drone? I don't think those terminal seekers are connected to IFF, which is why a lot of these missile systems involve using both the semi active radar homing (which is connected to IFF) alongside the active radar or infrared seekers (not connected to IFF) for terminal guidance. That's my hypothesis at the moment, that Ansarallah exploited something there after the F/A-18F took off.

      Either that, or someone on the missile cruiser left the CIWS on fully automatic operation by mistake, after being shot at by missiles and drones, and it lit up the F/A-18F right after takeoff. As far as I'm aware, CIWS is not connected to IFF.

      Interested to know what you think of this.