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> That made the RADAR LOCK alarm go off in the cockpit and the trainee, as he was trained to do, immediately hit countermeasures without thinking. (That will save your life!)

And this is why there are armament switching which you turn on only when you enter approved airspace to employ weapons / countermeasures and turn off when you leave (and vocalize on the radio to do so for the rest of the jets in the formation). Then pushing the button which releases weapons or countermeasures does nothing.

...and then the enemy surprise-attacks you in your own airspace and easily shoots down all your planes?

My comment, as well as the parent post, refers to training. When not in training, the placement of armament switches, as well as many other risk avoidance measures, will vary based on the type of conflict and risk. There is a good article from a Ukrainian fighter pilot you can read to see the extreme opposite of the training environment (high risk flight with enemy overhead). The most surprising thing is that he doesn't run pre-flight checks. I bet he took off with those switches armed.

> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44877/ukrainian-fighte...

This comment is correct, it is not "normal" to enable the RADAR threat subsystem on training runs or when just flying along in your own airspace. The fault here was on the check pilot who thought it would be "fun" to turn that subsystem on to see the reaction.

No one is making a surprise attack on one airplane over Sunnyvale.

Just look at this from a risk management perspective. Chance of aircraft being surprise-attacked in extremely well-defended airspace during peacetime: essentially zero. Consequences of that aircraft being surprise-attacked: loss of one aircraft and crew.

Chance of inadvertent release of weapons and/or countermeasures when switched on: apparently not zero, given the trainee's response. (An automatic response that I would be very, very, very pleased to see as an instructor!) Consequences: potential loss of civilian life and/or property.

So you have zero * (1 airplane + 1 crew), versus non-zero * (? civilians + ? buildings). I know which side of that inequality I'm landing on.

On one side of the equation, where you've got zero (but it's not, it's just very close to zero) and the consequences may be your death of you don't act and are wrong.

It's like hearing gunshots outside the window of your house in your very safe hated community because someone thought it would be fun to prank you with a gun with blanks. Do you drive to the ground and maybe hurt yourself or knock some things over and damage them, or do you do nothing convinced that there's no way someone could be firing a gun close by?

I know what I'd do, and it's not the one that relies on a bunch of assumptions going against what the situation is presenting itself as when getting it wrong might mean my death.

> hated community

Freud would surely be proud.

Lol, Freud would have a field day with phone keyboard auto-corrections and fat-fingerings. :)

No one was making surprise attacks against Honolulu in 1940, either. The point of the military is to be credibly prepared for even low likelihood events (which, due to game theory, is what makes them low likelihood in the first place).

There also weren’t reconnaissance satellites in 1941 that would detect some fleet leaving Vladivostok (or some western Chinese port). There weren’t over the horizon radars, or airborne interceptors with radar that can see hundreds of miles. It’s a completely different scenario in almost every way.

Finally, no current potential enemy state has the kind of aircraft carrier fleet needed to perform that the of attack. The U.K. and China both have two active carriers, but the Chinese are still training up. The Japanese launched about 300 planes from six carriers.

Nowadays, any surprise attack on the United States would be a counterforce launch of hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs with at most twenty minutes of warning to launch a response, and hours to launch a second strike, assuming command and control networks remained active.

What do you think does the risk-reward tradeooff look like between the risk of accidentally firing a live rocket in friendly territory and delayed response in an invasion that somehow managed to sneak by all early warning systems to the point where one unexpectant figher pilot has to intervene within milliseconds?

The only scenario after the invention of modern surveillance/detection mechanisms I can think of would have been 9/11 and in that case the problem wasn't reaction time but red tape, identification of compromised airplanes and willingness to shoot down civilian planes full of American citizens who might already be trying to recapture the plane.

You don't arm switches like that in training unless over a suitable area, like the water. Combat is different, where you may keep it armed on TO and landing for the reason discussed.

To be fair, the planes at Pearl Harbor were arranged to prevent sabotage, which made them easier targets for an air attack. There are tradeoffs to every kind of preparedness.

all guns should have a safety...

I mean, it wouldn't be the first time someone forgot one or two of their FENCE checks...

It reminds me of a similar story I heard a while ago. As in your story, some military contractors were testing a new radar system at the factory. And conveniently, the factory was near an international airport, so they were using the civilian traffic as targets. As these planes usually don't have threat detectors, they were completely unaware they were used as guinea pigs for this new radar.

That was until someone had the brilliant idea to test the radar on an El Al plane...

This must have scared the hell out of the Israeli pilots and it seems this created a small diplomatic incident.

I had to do a double take over 2 days to understand what you mean.

I've flown El Al...but I forgot the brand. In the initial read, I thought you were referring to a fighter plane make (kfir, mirage, sukoi, mig etc) so your story didnt make sense. Your story is more enticing with that context

> immediately hit countermeasures without thinking

Out of curiosity, if this is the doctrine, why doesn't the plane just fire countermeasures automatically?

https://extantaerospace.com/products/ALE-47_CDU.pdf [pdf]

In the picture above you will see a dial for modes. They range from human tell the machine exactly what to do (via the PRGM dial and other switches), to human consent to what the machine wants to do, to machine do what you want to do.

I'd be willing to bet the "hit the countermeasures immediately" reflex was because they were landing. Low altitude, low speed, no ability to maneuver. If somebody was shooting at you in that situation the missile would be on you in seconds and countermeasures are the only chance you have.

In a more normal combat situation there's a lot more human judgement needed in the use of countermeasures. For example if a fighter locks you up and fires a missile from 50 km away and you fire chaff immediately you might temporarily disrupt their lock, but it's likely that the chaff will disperse and they'll be able to re-lock you before the missile gets anywhere close. You can't just fire them off continuously because it's a limited consumable.

If you’re low on countermeasures you may want to dole them out more sparingly.

Pretty much. There's a recent video going around of a Russian helicopter in Ukraine firing off all its flares in panic after its sister helicopter is taken out by MANPADS. Predictably, the Ukrainians wait until he runs out, and then he gets taken out anyway. Not that hard to search for it.

Indeed. I was thinking about the same video in response to this question.

Here is a link: https://twitter.com/Blue_Sauron/status/1517817773199699977

It seems like the natural next step would be "automatically deploy countermeasures while you still have [some threshold] remaining, then revert to manual below that," but I can also see how needing to train pilots in two or more different modes starts to pile up complexity costs and maybe leads to more mistakes compared to a simpler system.

I'm not sure the pilot would even notice the missile to do anything about it manually..

/Why, I oughta....

-- In Military Countermeasures

Some systems do. I've worked on one.

This was super interesting regarding the ejection seat's features and behavior depending on speed and altitude at which the seat ejects.

https://martin-baker.com/products/mk16-ejection-seat-for-raf...

Ah, the balancing act of human in the loop.

That reminds me of this story:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8u0q6i/tifu_by_scarin...

Love those old stories. I've climbed through the P-3 on static display outside the ramp, and I wish they still flew more of them around there. I used to be friends with a guy at the local grocery store who was a P-3 mechanic.