6 ms·

I thought these sorts of planes would have a safety. And if the safety is designed in such a way without i.e. interlocks and such that you can fire off guns ac

• smdyc1 8y ago
  Now I don't know about fighters, but I used to work on C-130s. Countermeasure systems (flare and chaff) rely on a weight on wheels microswitch completing a circuit when the aircraft is in the air, safety pins being removed from a panel to arm the system, an on switch, and a guarded switch being activated before the system can be used. Now sometimes the weight on wheels switches need to be bypassed for testing a wide range of aircraft systems. Perhaps the aircraft was on jacks (tyre replacement?) or some sort of EMI occurred... But ultimately there really is a great deal of safety layers that had to be compromised for this to happen, including human factors. Like with software development, you can't predict every possible action of your users (air or ground crew), and sooner or later you'll encounter an edge case nobody had considered.
• poof131 8y ago
  There is an “arm” switch.[1] This certainly shouldn’t have happened and indicates a break down in safety procedures. Significant maintenance should not be performed on an aircraft with ordnance. The plane never should have been armed. The maintainer should have been careful around the trigger. And a plane loaded with forward firing ordnance should not be pointed at another plane. This seems like a Commanding Officer gets fired type accident. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=f+16+master+arm+switch https://www.google.com/search?q=f+16+master+arm+switch