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
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
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.
IFF is just a transponder. The missile itself cannot determine who is friendly or not, and can absolutely get confused by radar/IR signature.
What we do know is that Israel has exploited this tactic before (on a larger scale) by having their F-16 shadowing a Russian military transport plane and caused it to be shot down by Syrian SAM