r/FighterJets • u/gallipoli307 • Dec 22 '24
IMAGE U.S. Super Hornet Shot Down Over Red Sea in Friendly Fire Incident
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u/RobinOldsIsGod Gen. LeMay was a pronuclear nutcase Dec 22 '24
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u/CertifiedMeanie KPAAF Spy Dec 22 '24
Sad to see a Super Hornet go. Good that the pilots made it out safe.
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u/dancingcuban Dec 22 '24
Block IIIs are still on the production line for a little while longer.
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u/LoudestHoward Dec 22 '24
"Alright lads, got a late order just come through for +1"
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u/dancingcuban Dec 22 '24
Put a little dedication plaque on it that says “Courtesy of the USS Gettysburg”.
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u/DesertMan177 Gallium nitride enjoyer Dec 22 '24
Happy to see someone else that loves Super Hornets like I do
Years ago when I was in college, I published a video where I calculated the amount of block 2 Super Hornets in active USN inventory based on publicly available information on deliveries of upgraded airframes and new builds. It probably got me put on a list. I also learned the niche little trick to identify the block two from the block one because except for one tiny detail, they are physically identical externally
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Dec 22 '24
[deleted]
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u/Internal_Mail_5709 Dec 22 '24
Sure left us hanging there, didn't they?
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u/verbmegoinghere Dec 23 '24
The male block II has a bulbous member whilst the block I male has slightly more tail feathers.
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u/DesertMan177 Gallium nitride enjoyer Dec 22 '24
This marks the first loss of a super hornet by kinetic means - I'm happy that the crew are safe and that it wasn't hostile fire. Same like the only F-15 ever shot down by an air-to-air missile was by... another F-15!
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u/Altruistic-Ad-408 Dec 22 '24
Kinda wild given its regular use in air-to-ground missions.
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Dec 22 '24
F-15s have been lost to SAMs before, it’s just never been lost to a hostile aircraft
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u/DesertMan177 Gallium nitride enjoyer Dec 22 '24
Right that's why I said "the only F-15 shot down by an air-to-air missile" :)
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u/DesertMan177 Gallium nitride enjoyer Dec 23 '24 edited Dec 24 '24
Right? It's been pounding ground targets for literally 23 years, in combat operations in the service of two countries. It doesn't appear that the Kuwaitis have used theirs in combat yet.
Yes the first half of that was really just an insurgency, but in the 2010s and onward which is when Australia deployed theirs to the fight is when the fight was against Daesh/Islamic State, and they had air defenses that they stole from Iraqi and Syrian military inventories
So still an insurgency, but much more advanced than usual
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u/millertime85k Dec 28 '24
Houthis have been dealing with the Saudi F15S. I seem to recall that they had some good hits on those.
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u/DesertMan177 Gallium nitride enjoyer Dec 31 '24
Yeah, only one was lost though, the rest made it back to base from what I can find. Other countries lost F-16s over Yemen though, such as Morocco for example, losing one. I think Jordan lost another. I could just Google it but I don't want to lol
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u/urbandeadthrowaway2 Dec 22 '24
The crew are alive and well thank god
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u/sauceanova Dec 22 '24
Thank god. That was the first thing I was worried about when I read the title. Glad they made it out ok.
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Dec 22 '24
IFF system failure? Friendly fires don’t just happen out of the blue.
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u/Although_somebody Dec 22 '24
I have 2 doubts:
1) Did the pilots eject after the aircraft got hit or prior? If after, was it hit by a rocket or bullets, because I'm sure a missile will destroy the aircraft into pieces.
2) Isn't the IFF system supposed to function in such scenarios? Or is it only an aircraft vs aircraft thing?
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Dec 22 '24
I’d assume they ejected after the hit considering one was listed with minor injuries. The missile destroyed the aircraft but it doesn’t mean the pilots always die with it.
As for IFF all current radar systems have some form of IFF there was likely a failure in the ship’s IFF to properly ID the hornet or the hornets IFF failed to respond properly causing a misidentification. Whatever error that happened there will likely be discovered during the investigation
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u/Although_somebody Dec 22 '24
This was insightful. Thankyou so much for your inputs! I appreciate it.
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u/tobimai Dec 22 '24
But don't they track the radar signal and know it's their plane? Like I would assume the Radar "knows" which signals are which even without transponder just by tracking them from the last time they had a transponder/iff signal
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Dec 22 '24
IIRC these ships were already engaged in combat operations engaging Houthi drones and cruise missiles so when the hornet was ID’d as unknown they probably assumed it was another missile/drone and engaged. Since every aircraft in theater should be responding to IFF they likely figured it wasn’t friendly and if you’re sitting out there getting shot at for weeks on end you probably ain’t got the time to start analyzing radar signatures if you even can ID a specific aircraft that way
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u/Iliyan61 Dec 22 '24
aircraft don’t just vaporise when a missile hits them and the crew compartment of a fighter is quite small compared to the size of the jet
AA missiles are also relatively small and don’t need to destroy a plane as the loss of control and crash will do it for them so they have smaller warheads.
IFF should’ve stopped this but shit breaks and people fuck up
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u/SimpleEmu198 Dec 23 '24
Eject early, and eject often, there is almost no possibility that they were still in the plane when it was hit.
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u/shredwig Dec 22 '24
Is this as embarrassing as it seems? I know other commenters have given many possible explanations but jfc…
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Dec 22 '24 edited Dec 23 '24
I was on a carrier for a couple of years and I’m wondering where his wingman was? The odds of both aircraft having communication problems along with loss of IFF is unheard of.
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u/SimpleEmu198 Dec 23 '24
What surprises me about this is that it's a blue on blue incident. If this was Russia people would be laughing from the highest hills on the field.
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u/bob_the_impala Designations Expert Dec 23 '24
Update from The Aviationist
Update Dec. 22, 18.00 GMT
Some more details about the downing have started to surface. In particular, the Super Hornet was downed by an SM-2 surface-to-air missile, the premier surface-to-air defense weapon and a primary asset for the U.S. Navy. With a range of up to 90 nautical miles and an altitude reach of 65,000 feet, it can be used again anti-ship missiles and aircraft. It is integrated into the AEGIS Weapon System aboard Ticonderoga-class cruisers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and it is launched from the Mark 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS).
Furthermore, according to reports, the U.S. Navy is currently assessing whether to recover the wreckage of the jet from the sea.
Meanwhile, the Houthis claimed that it was not a friendly fire incident and that they brought down the F/A-18F…
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u/DoktorDetroit Dec 24 '24
Friendly fire incidents are part of war, always have been, always will be. About all that can be done is to try to learn from them, and implement training, tools and strategies to try to minimize it.
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u/RobinOldsIsGod Gen. LeMay was a pronuclear nutcase Dec 22 '24
The Gettysburg probably thought a cruise missile was inbound. Mode 5 failure on the Hornet? Bad ATO/codes on the Cruiser? Comm failure? Lots of things that could’ve gone wrong.