Originally Posted by
Heathrow Harry
they never went to action stations, no-one called the Captain and the officers on the bridge were "mesmerised" and no action was taken to try and shoot it down.. etc etc
She had no means of splashing an Exocet at close range. Quoting myself from another forum:
Remember reports are written for an intended audience of people who understand the tactical, technical, and human aspects.
This is why others might have pointed out that the report needs to be seen in the wider context of a task group 8000 miles from home, operating in a part of the World where false radar returns due to atmospherics are an issue. Additionally, the intelligence on whether or not the Argentines had got the Super Eterndard/Exocet combination working was unclear.
I have my copy of
One Hundred Days with me, Admiral Woodward comments that there had been a number of false alarms that day and the FAAWC was reluctant to expend chaff without good reason.
Somewhere in the BOI there is a note that the Exocet was not seen as it was lost the reflected ground wave from the 965 radar, this was due to the beamwidth. 965 was an old radar that was not fitted to later Type 42s. Likewise detecting the Exocet's own radar (apart from the problem of SCOT transmitting on I band) was that the Exocet would be silent until the last phase of flight. The sequence of the attacks was something like:
1. Aircraft take off from Argentina, and are refuelled in flight.
2. Aircraft approach task force at very low altitude to avoid radar detection. Exercises against Argentine Type 42s have been used to refine the tactics.
3. Aircraft pop up, briefly exposing themselves to detection by radar. They briefly turned on Agave radar to look for targets before returning to low level.
4. Aircraft pop up again, turn on their radars, and the heading/range information is fed to the Exocet, which is then fired. The aircraft return to the safety of low level for the flight home.
5. The Exocet heads towards the target in radar silence, until popping up and looking where it expects to find a target. The radar has a limited arc of view, and aims for the largest target it can see.
The point with chaff is that it has to present a larger target (Radar Cross Section) than the ship that fired it - that takes a finite time as the cloud blooms, and demands precise ship handling by the OOW, lest you steam into your own chaff cloud. If you see the incoming missile with the mark one eyeball - is there enough time?
I have no idea at what range the Exocet was seen, but lets assume it was 1 nm. The speed of Exocet is widely given as Mach 0.9, so if we assume Mach 1 is 720 kts that is approximately 650 kts.
This suggests it would only have been seen in the last 5.5 seconds. Enough time to fire a full pattern and for it to bloom? With the missile that close, would the chaff cloud be within the Exocet radar's limited arc of view?
Also some of the comments seem to the think the OOW watched the missile from the time it was launched. Clearly not, and I think I read somewhere the slightly obvious conclusion that if the OOW had called
Action Stations it would have resulted in people moving about and doors being open at the time of impact and the subsequent blast/fireball. This would have increased the damage sustained and the number of casualties.
The following occasions when chaff was used successfully differed in that the task group knew it was under attack and fired chaff in good time.
Another particularly nasty allegation is that members of the ship's company were calling home via satellite, which transmitted on I band, blanking out the radar from aircraft and missile. I believe that back in 1982, RN personnel aboard ship did not have telephone communications with home, and certainly not in a war zone. However, ships in a task group do need to communicate. One of the BOI reports includes a comment that
Sheffield should have used a HF Task Group RATT circuit instead of SCOT.
However, HF was problematic in the South Atlantic, and the proceedings report from HMS
Antrim mentions the difficulties with HF.
I think you might find all the posts on
Page Seven of that thread to be educational.