Originally Posted by PAXboy
Indeed it might have been but: when you have a warship bristling with technology and you have great faith in that technology and have been trained that your entire job is to work through the technology and then the technology will bring you the enemy ... ? I once saw someone sacked from a job because the company believed the technology - not the human being.
Just an afterthought ... It seems as if this warship only had electronic lookouts. There may well have been 'manual' lookouts who had seen the civ a/c and would have been expecting that the guys down below would know about it and were preparing to strike a mil a/c. They might have been rather surprised when the civ got blasted.
I counted at least 4 lookouts on the bridge from the offical navy film about the incident, but if the had a view of the area where the aircraft was I do not know...