The big questions here are why the drone wasn’t registered as a friendly, and why is the communication between US and Germany so poor that Germans didn’t know that US was flying a drone on this route.
Human error most likely, flight and radar controllers are humans too, but they will almost certainly be demoted or punished severely for this mistake. Reasonably so, could you imagine the international PR disaster it would be if this was a manned US plane?
I agree, it does show how a lot of things aren’t well ironed out in my opinion. I forget who exactly, but I recall one of US ex military people was talking about this a while back. He said that NATO stopped doing serious exercises in the 90s, and those are essential to having smooth operations. That’s how you shake out supply chain issues, communication problems, etc.
The big questions here are why the drone wasn’t registered as a friendly, and why is the communication between US and Germany so poor that Germans didn’t know that US was flying a drone on this route.
we know why the communication was bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xacdDrylrek
as for the friendly thing, someone must’ve misread friend for feind, or vice versa…
Human error most likely, flight and radar controllers are humans too, but they will almost certainly be demoted or punished severely for this mistake. Reasonably so, could you imagine the international PR disaster it would be if this was a manned US plane?
Not that I would mind hehe
I agree, it does show how a lot of things aren’t well ironed out in my opinion. I forget who exactly, but I recall one of US ex military people was talking about this a while back. He said that NATO stopped doing serious exercises in the 90s, and those are essential to having smooth operations. That’s how you shake out supply chain issues, communication problems, etc.