Word: iraq
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...SEEMED AS ROUTINE AS PUNCHING UP a favorite station on the car radio--the simple push of a button. But this time it would kill them. Before lifting off from southern Turkey, bound for northern Iraq on April 14 of last year, the pilots of two U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters activated the "friend-or-foe" system designed to identify them to other U.S. aircraft. They set it to frequency 42. That was the setting prescribed in the top-secret "air-tasking order" they received from the Air Force each day they ventured into the part of Iraq policed...
This lethal snafu is likely to aggravate charges that the Air Force has tended to distort and cover up information in its investigation of the incident as well as other accidents involving military aircraft. Senior Army pilots flying in Iraq on the day of the shoot-down discovered the coding glitch after they were called as expert witnesses at the court-martial of Air Force Captain Jim Wang. A top officer aboard the AWACS reconnaissance plane coordinating U.S. aircraft in the region, Wang was cleared last week of all charges in connection with the shoot-down. As the Army pilots...
...down declared both helicopters were on the wrong frequency but never explained why. The Army pilots said they had kept to a single frequency until five days after the shoot-down, when a revamped Air Force tasking order finally told them to change to a second frequency when entering Iraq. "I'm furious about it," says Chief Warrant Officer Ken Holden, who spent eight months over Iraq. "The Air Force set the stage for this accident to occur...
...senior in rank, Wickson was the so-called flight lead the day of the shoot-down, making Wickson largely responsible for what occurred. In part because of that prosecutorial decision, 26 charges of negligent homicide against May were dropped. Furthermore, the top officer responsible for the operation in northern Iraq, Brigadier General Jeffrey Pilkington, was never called to testify in the May proceeding. Yet he did testify at Wang's court-martial, where he said the F-15 pilots violated the rules of engagement when they launched missiles at the two Black Hawks after misidentifying them as Iraqi Hind helicopters...
...only court-martial to follow from the 1994 "friendly fire" downing of two U.S. helicopters patrolling the "no fly" zone over northern Iraq ended in the acquittal of the sole person charged: Air Force Captain Jim Wang, the senior director aboard the awacs plane monitoring the region. Wang claimed that his radarscope did not identify the choppers as friendly and that he was being pursued as a scapegoat; his acquittal means that no one involved in the attack--including the two F-15 pilots who fired on the helicopters--will be held criminally accountable for the snafu's 26 deaths...