Ah! The old smoking gun thing again, eh? If by smoking gun we mean a clear and unambiguous accident cause, then no, of course it wasn't.
I was under the impression from some posts that it was to be considered the only or main issue to be discussed / investigated.
Likewise the infamous Chinook FADEC wasn't a smoking gun, nor the known phenomena of UFCM's, or control jams in one, two, or even all three axis. So we shall never why ZD576 slammed into a Scottish hillside taking all 29 lives with it. What we do know though is that it was Grossly Unairworthy, and was known to be so. That is what these accidents have in common.
Is it clear the IFF issue is related to airworthiness? If I recall, air safety, which includes airworthiness, excludes the effects of "hostile action". You could argue the functionality of an IFF system sits both sides of the line here.
As an aside, are we to believe that there was no crew action that could be taken to ameliorate the danger of a blue on blue had they known that they had an IFF failure? I find that hard to believe, but there again I was never a roughty toughty type and await clarification from those who are, or were...
I didn't say that, I said even though there may have been crew action that could have been applied, they may not have mitigated the actions of the battery.
If I read right the Patriot system declared it as a Anti Radiation Missile attack - this raises all sorts of questions as to how it was set up (what was the ARM 'threat' in this theatre, a Kh28? Was there really a credible capability existing in Iraq? From what launch platform, which airfield? Even if yes, what are its operational characteristics - isn't it basically a Mach 3 missile? How do you confuse the radar returns from such a threat with a GR4?
EDIT: I've just read this....
http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/32E5E...10_22mar03.pdf
...very diplomatically put, but you can almost here the writers thinking "WTF" as they write about the "generic/broad" ARM profiles loaded into the patriot and training/doctrine that didn't appear to place much importance on focussing on the threats in theatre......
...some of the recommendations are revealing
a. make sure the US get the full report.
b. RAF liaison types must make sure changes are followed up in the US.