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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, Informative) by VLM on Sunday January 08 2017, @09:34PM
There's some language choice stuff where the korean translation was "mistaken" but when American clickbait sites report its "accidental"
There are solid procedural reason to hit the "eject external stores" button like engine failure, incoming missile or similar maneuvering challenge, fire report, declaring an emergency landing, probably some navy specific stuff (debug code 0x02F4 means accidental arming of warhead advise immediate eject, who knows).
The original korean translation specifically listed no mechanical failure so we can rule out a false fire warning, however it could have been a procedural drill gone out of control, the story I like about a CFI on the ride along trying to give the copilot a check ride to qual him after hours in the simulator and the poor bastard says something in korean like "and the next step in the engine failure procedure is hitting the eject external stores button and (clunking sound as $5M just flushed down toilet) whoops-a-daisy forgot we're not in the simulator on the ground".