Friendly Fire Notebook

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004 04:37:16 GMT, Buzzer wrote:

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004 00:16:59 GMT, "Gord Beaman" )
wrote:

Not a bit surprising Guy...the finest minds in the world are all
prone to these kinds of 'filling in' from the observed hints
intermixed with what the witness expects to happen and intermixed
again with his prior memories etc.

Pilot walks into debriefing at Ubon around in 67 and talks about the
heavy AAA around the target. I believe just above the DMZ. Pilot is
really hyped up talking about evasive actions, etc. Another crew
walking by the door hears him and starts laughing. It wasn't AAA. It
was the CBUs the other crew had just dropped.

Absolutely! Not at all an uncommon occurence. You might want to add
the relative combat experience of the two pilots--my guess (and it's
no more than that) is the first guy was an FNG and the second was a
FOG. ("new" and "old")

Similarly the reports of hundreds of SAM firings quite often were the
result of numerous observers of the same event from different
positions. Without some common timeline and a bit of triangulation,
the data becomes meaningless.

Can't begin to tell you the number of times tense newbies called SAM
launches on Shrike or Standard ARM firings or even the fuel mist trail
of a jettisoned tank.

AB plumes, the tell-tale streak of white contrail caused by unburned
fuel out the back before ignition, often get you a SAM or Atoll call
as well.

Which simply goes back to my original contention--evaluation of the
observer is at least as important at evaluation of the observation.



Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
Smithsonian Institution Press
ISBN #1-58834-103-8