Friendly fire accident

To provide additional understanding of STAMP, it is used to describe the causes of several very different types of losses—a friendly fire shootdown of a U.S. Army helicopter by a U.S. Air Force fighter jet over northern Iraq, the contamination of a public water system with E. coli bacteria in a small town in Canada, and the loss of a Milstar satellite. Chapter 5 presents the friendly fire accident analysis. The other accident analyses are contained in appendixes B and C. 

On April 15,1994, after nearly three years of daily operations over the TAOR (Tactical Area of Responsibility), two U.S. Air Force F-15 s patrolling the area shot down two US. Army Black Hawk helicopters, mistaking them for Iraqi Hind helicopters. The Black Hawks were carrying twenty-six people, fifteen U.S. citizens and eleven others, among them British, French, and Turkish military officers as well as Kurdish citizens. All were killed in one of the worst air-to-air friendly fire accidents involving U.S. aircraft in military history. 

The Hierarchical Safety Control Structure to Prevent Friendly Fire Accidents... 

The NCA and UNCINCEUR must estabhsh a command and control structure that provides the ability to prevent friendly fire accidents. 

The guidelines for ROE generated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (with tailoring to suit specific operational conditions) must be capable of preventing friendly fire accidents in all types of situations. 

Rules of engagement and operational orders and plans must be established at the command level that prevent friendly fire accidents. The plans must include allocating responsibility and establishing and monitoring communication channels to allow for coordination of flights into the theater of action. 

To prevent friendly fire accidents, pilots need to know exactly what friendly aircraft are flying in the no-fly zone at all times as well as know and follow the ROE and other procedures for preventing such accidents. The higher levels of control delegated the authority and guidance to develop local procedures to the CTF level and below. These local procedures included ... 

Communication Communication is important in preventing friendly fire accidents. The US. Army Black Hawk helicopters carried a full array of standard avionics, radio, IFF, and radar equipment as well as communication equipment consisting of FM, UHF, and VHP radios. Each day the FM and UHF radios were keyed with classified codes to allow pilots to talk secure in encrypted mode. Tlie ACO directed that special frequendes were to be used when flying inside the TAOR. 

Physical identification is also important in preventing friendly fire accidents. The ROE require that the pilots perform a visual identification of the potential threat. To assist in this identification, the Black Hawks were marked with six two-by-three-foot American flags. An American flag was painted on each door, on both... 

With all these controls and this elaborate control structure to protect against friendly fire accidents, which was a well-known hazard, how could the shootdown occur on a clear day with all equipment operational As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefe of Staff said after the accident ... 

In the friendly fire accident analyzed in chapter 5, the responsibility of the AWACS controllers had officially been disambiguated by assigning one to control aircraft within the no-fly zone and the other to monitor and control aircraft outside it. This partitioning of control broke down over time, however, with the result that neither controlled the Black Hawk helicopter on that fateful day. No performance... 

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