How does the SAM (surface to air missile) not fire on friendly aircraft and only on enemy aircraft?
In: Technology
To add to the comments about IFF, modern radar systems can examine the radio signatures emitted by aircraft. Those signatures are surprisingly unique, at least as far as radio emitters go….all you need from there is a database of known radios on known aircraft and you can get a fairly accurate understanding of what is flying around. Not good enough for a safe automated SAM system, but good enough to at least go “Oh hey these radio emissions look like those of a friendly craft so we better not fire”.
If it’s flying completely silent though (all radios off), this won’t work as a detection method. IFF is generally coordinated with this to make the system more accurate, and typically unless the system is 100% certain it won’t automatically fire (and would require an operator to fire).
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