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Apparently a South Korean patrol airplane accidentally dropped its load into the Sea of Japan.
A South Korean maritime patrol airplane lost its entire loadout of live weapons when a crew member accidentally hit the wrong button. Nearly $5 million dollars' worth of weapons tumbled into the Sea of Japan. The South Korean military is attempting to recover the weapons, which it says were not armed when lost.
The incident was reported on January 1 by the Yonhap News Agency. The U.S.-made P-3CK Orion maritime patrol aircraft was flying a routine mission over the Sea of Japan when a crew member on board "mistakenly touched the emergency weapons release switch."
[...] The South Korean military has sent a minesweeper and a salvage ship to the area to fetch the weapons and pledged it won't drop $5 millions worth of missiles in the future.
I wonder if they'll take it out of his paycheck?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday January 08 2017, @07:49PM
Cnet claims its a weird combo of 3 harpoon missiles, a decent long range anti-ship missile, 1 torp theoretically dual purpose but probably anti-sub, and some depth charges which are anti-sub
1) If the dude who hit the button drives a Ferrari to work tomorrow and a NK "fishing vessel" was in the area and the recovery team can't find the parts then we got a problem, well the poor bastard with the brand new Ferrari has a bigger problem, but you know... Normally you toss crap overboard and other than for training you don't sweat it. Therefore they might be lying and its Hollywood movie plot about the classified brand new software load on the Harpoons or the misc unnamed torp is a research special etc. Whatever they fish out of the water is likely not wartime grade after recovery. I suppose the engineers might find it minimally interesting to see the results of saltwater immersion but being naval and all that they may have possibly researched that to death already.
2) What a peculiar peacetime loadout. I was never in the Navy but that sounds like a heavy peacetime loadout, but ridiculously light for wartime. Perhaps nothing literally happened other than signalling to the NK/China/007 Bond Villain/WTF that they're always ready to drop the hammer 24x7 even if its a little pink girlie cute hammer. Or signalling that they're not trying to start a war this week. Or its espionage of a peculiar sort knowing it'll make civilian news that this loadout implies in public that ... Or maybe its a middle finger F you to the NK that three harpoons is about all thats necessary to wipe out what is actually operational in their 4th world submarine navy.
3) Possibly their training is crap. Everyone makes fun of non-1st world training and you can just hear some cheap bastard at the briefing droning on about "and we're gonna pencil whip feet wet engine failure practice simulations today but remember that you're carrying live fish so perform every step of the muscle memory engine failure procedure EXCEPT hitting jettison external stores button I say again do not hit the eject button" and muscle memory being muscle memory, the poor SOB hit the "jettison external stores" button just like he's hit it 200 times in on the ground training simulators, and there's nothing wrong with it other than being extremely expensive training to do it for real. In the USA we'd just send out a plane without $5M of external stores such that when the pilot hits eject, $5M doesn't land in the ocean. I wonder if US Navy planes on ASW carry live rounds all the time ... or at all.
4) Possibly a Hollywood grade coverup where a Chinese sub launched a drone or did some ECM radio bullshit and scared the ever living hell out of the pilot thinking there's an incoming SAM or AAM and right before pooping his pants as part of incoming missile evasion procedures, he punched the eject external stores button and then ... Oh wait nothing hit us damn those NK / Chicoms / 2600 readers / practical jokers. A little embarrassing. Well we could do the Chinese a favor and tell the whole world they have a secret floating bouy that really accurately simulates an incoming SAM or just BS past the whole story with "ha ha hit the wrong button ha ha". The Chinese will know it worked but for some reason they wouldn't be telling the rest of the world. Or maybe they did and they're cover storying it in the media.
I would think it would be relatively cheap and easy to make a drone that simulates the launch of a SAM and it would be somewhat militarily effective, especially if you mixed human SAM crews in such that 1 in 20 times its a real incoming SAM and the other 19 in 20 times you got a total offensive mission kill for the cost of a cheap drone.
5) I wonder if the mission has been published for the airplane.. was it doing ASW? I always wondered what would happen if you launch a Harpoon against a submarine. Maybe the SK know and thats why they were carrying three. Most of my "naval wargame simulators" don't tolerate launching a Harpoon against sub targets. I would imagine it would be the ultimate 1 shot 1 kill unless the sub crash dived fast enough. So there's a range issue. Then again a giant prop plane isn't a hovering helicopter so maybe it IS modern 2010s naval doctrine to hunt subs with harpoon missiles at least from fixed wing aircraft...
Its a hell of an interesting story if you try to "alternative history" it up a bit.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:13PM
+1 just for this insight.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2017, @08:44PM
Dude! Belonging to the BOYS CLUB makes MY DICK so FUCKING HARD bro.
It's so great to like all the same things that the group likes! BRO we're so SOCIAL dude!@!1
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday January 08 2017, @09:43PM
That's kind of a strange response -- I've never read 2600, any more than you have, but its readership target is (was?) just the kind of folks that tinker with infrastructure leading to such comical outcomes as this. In general, this is a group of people who like to tinker, but not destroy; as opposed to those who tend to tinker terroristically. It's insightful to point out that such people exist--and that monkeying around with military exercises would not necessarily indicate a bad actor; perhaps it's just someone displaying a weakness in the system for fun, not profit/loss.
What has groupthink or sociality to do with that?
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Monday January 09 2017, @12:04AM
Sounds like another chemically imbalanced AC posting random crap.
I read 2600, along with other publications. I like making and breaking stuff. There's not really anyone else physically around me with similar interests, and it's refreshing to see things more interesting than "look I put LEDs on something!" which is what the majority of the arduino and raspberrypi guys on G+ like doing.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Monday January 09 2017, @02:46AM
Exactly. I've got a nice little mostly–complete library of issues going back to around 2000, even like to re–read the older ones every so often as a reminder of things have changed — and my naughty bits assure me that I'm quite definitely female, gender stereotypes be damned.