Friendly fire

[Andy O'Pray]

I have just been listening to a radio programme. Apparently some professor has written a paper on friendly fire incidents throughout history.

The mother of all friendly fire incidents. During WW2 a little reported incident. Some American pilots missed Germany completely and dropped their bombs on Zurich, Switzerland.

Aye - Andy.

[Tab]

I think one of the biggest friendly fire incidents must have been when the Americans open fire on the British Airborne Forces on the there way to invade Sicily and managed to bring about half the planes down. This is the reason that allied aircraft were paint with black and white stripes on the wings and fusealage so that all the short sighted gunners might be able to make out just what aircraft were friendly

[Gearjammer351]

Joint training is is one solution but even more important IFF transponders on ALL vehicles(ground and air) should be a priority-I don't know why it isn't done already but it's long overdue.The cost would be easily offset by saving lives and destroyed vehicles.

[harry hackedoff]

Indeed Gearjammer. A point I`ve made before. The cost of the IFF kit is less than a decent CD player. Which, in terms of lives and equipment lost, is knack all.
Aye,

[Rotary Booty]

Just a thought, the Tornado that was shot down by a Patriot had IFF!

[Gearjammer351]

That's true-I didn't hear the final result of the investigation on that,was the IFF functioning properly?Aircraft FF incidents are very rare because of the IFF.That is why I believe ground vehicles should have it also.

[IanH-RAF]

We got a brief from our crew about this event, what they "think" happened (wrong side of iraq to see it clearly). The Tonka was flying in a 4 ship with the last guy's IFF U/S. Now, the USAF Awacs saw this but put out on the net that the last guy was an Unknown (rather than asking the 3 other RAF guy's he was flying in close proximity with ) and that was passed to a patriot crew who fired 3 seconds after receiving the Unknown threat. The Procedures were changed shortly afterwards (but AFTER they did EXACTLY the same thing to a F16 which shot back!!) Basically they should have used a bit of common sense but then again I wasn't there to see what was happening. Bit of a shitter really

[Twenty One]

May I suggest that we paint on our aircraft the following:

WE ARE F***ING BRITISH!