F-16C In Errant Bombing Had Anti-"Friendly Fire" System
By Stephen Trimble/AviationNow.com
19-Apr-2002 3:57 PM U.S. EDT
A U.S. Air National Guard (ANG) F-16C that mistakenly fired on a Canadian unit in Afghanistan --killing at least four soldiers – carried a cockpit data system designed to reduce such identification errors on the battlefield.
But Canadian troops may have lacked a key radio device issued widely to U.S. troops that transmits their locations automatically to a display inside the pilot’s cockpit.
U.S. and Canadian military officials launched an investigation of the inadvertent bombing early Thursday, which wounded another eight Canadian soldiers as their unit conducted pre-dawn training near the allied base at Kandahar.
It appeared the pilot, of the 170th Fighter Squadron in Springfield, Ill., did not know he was flying over an area restricted to training, Pentagon officials told The Associated Press. Gunfire from the training exercise made him think he was under attack.
Since the late-1990s, Guard pilots flying upgraded F-16Cs have been using an off-the-shelf combat identification system called the Situation Awareness Data Link, said Fred Frey, a technical consultant to the Air National Guard’s and Air Force Reserve’s test center in Tucson, Ariz.
SADL gives each F-16C pilot a cockpit display pin-pointing the locations of other friendly aircraft and ground units, but there’s a catch: the pilot’s display shows only positions of other SADL-equipped planes and ground forces carrying special U.S. Army radios called the Enhanced Position Location Reporting System (EPLRS).
It was also not known Thursday if the Canadian forces held EPLRS or other compatible radios.
EPLRS radios are distributed on Army platforms, such as tanks and artillery, and are standard at the platoon level for some divisions. The radios allow mobile units to update their positions automatically, while stationary units report every five minutes.
In one training exercise, SADL transmitted and stored the locations of more than 1,100 ground units. The system shows the pilot the five ground units nearest to a selected target on a strike mission.
ANG and the U.S. Air Force began equipping the Guard’s Block 30/32 F-16Cs with SADL systems about three years ago.
The system is being evaluated for another purpose this week as part of the military’s Joint Combat Identification Evaluation 2002 event in Gulfport, Miss., which Frey is attending. Military planners are testing whether a SADL-equipped forward air controller could be removed from the front lines.
That proposal drew skepticism from Lt. Col. Jim Henderson, an ANG F-16 pilot who has flown a SADL-equipped aircraft for two years. There are still too many “gomers on the ground,” he said, who aren’t equipped with EPLRS.
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Помните, что война с арабами - это война ловушек, засад и убийств из-за угла. (с) Атос, граф де ла Фер ( с помощью А. Дюма)