A coroner today condemned the "glaring failures" that led to the killing of two British airmen when a US missile battery confused an RAF Tornado for an enemy attack.
An inquest into the deaths of the Tornado pilot, Flight Lieutenant Kevin Main, 35, and the navigator, Flight Lieutenant Dave Williams, 37, heard they were shot down by an American Patriot missile battery defending a coalition air base in Kuwait.
The tactical control officer in the battery gave the order to fire on their Tornado GR4 on March 22 2003 because her radar had wrongly identified it as an anti-radiation missile (ARM), a weapon that could destroy the Patriot battery by homing in on the radiation it emitted.
The Oxfordshire assistant deputy coroner, Andrew Walker, heard that the battery had the particular task of dealing with ballistic missiles and its staff were not trained to deal with aircraft or ARMs.
The Tornado was shot down 18 miles from the Ali Al Salem air base in Kuwait as it returned from a successful mission attacking south-west Baghdad as part of the "shock and awe" aerial bombardment by coalition forces. Both airmen were killed outright.
Working independently, the battery was not connected to the main information system, which would have shown the Tornado was in touch with air controllers and was not a threat.
The control officer ordered her staff to check with a neighbouring battery what was approaching them but got no response because the radios were "broken and distorted", the inquest heard.
Eventually the other battery replied that the contact was a "friendly" plane but the battery had already gone into "panic" mode and shot it down.
Wing Commander Stephen Cockram, who led the British side of the board of inquiry, told the coroner: "You are talking about people who would not have seen an ARM symbol before. It would have been a red symbol and an alarm. It would set people off before they started."
The coroner responded: "You sense the panic. They clearly felt they were in danger and didn't have the training to look at it in another way. You've got a team of people trained to do one task but they have no appreciation of other things that might stray into their area. That seems to come back time and time again as the main issue - having a battery working on its own."
Analysing Wing Cdr Cockram's evidence, Mr Walker condemned what he called "glaring failures" in the system to identify "friendly" aircraft and to ensure they were safe in a "potentially dangerous" area.
He questioned the wisdom of "sticking an autonomous Patriot battery in a flight path without any appropriate system to alert that Patriot to friendly aircraft".
He said he was aware that the Patriot software system had failed to identify flying objects in the past and that after the Tornado incident, a Patriot had shot down an American F18 in Iraq that it identified as a ballistic missile.
He said: "We don't have the witnesses because they would not come to the coroner's court to give evidence, so we don't know whether this was a failure in the Patriot software system. We are not privy to that part of the inquiry."
Evidence from US air force staff inside the battery was read to the inquest in the form of statements with names blanked out because the American authorities declined to provide live witnesses.
The statement from the officer who authorised the shooting said: "I can look back and say that I might have maybe waited longer, maybe I could have done differently. I have made the decision I have made and I have to live with that."
The officer was asked in interview: "Did you believe you were engaging an aircraft that night?" She replied: "No, I did not. I thought I was engaging an ARM."
She was asked: "Do you have the authority to engage an ARM?"
She replied: "Yes, if it's something that is threatening you, it's self-defence."
The inquest heard previously that all coalition planes are fitted with Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) systems that send signals to ensure they are not attacked by their own side.
But RAF engineers told the coroner yesterday that the IFF system could have blown a fuse or external electronic interference could have led the Patriot missile battery to identify the Tornado as a threat.
The coroner added that he thought it "unfair" to blame the IFF system for what happened. "It may be unfair to blame a piece of equipment for a failure when there is no evidence that it failed," he said.
The Tornado was from 9 Squadron, based at RAF Marham in Norfolk.
The hearing continues.