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Comment by _moof | Hacker News Reader

No one is making a surprise attack on one airplane over Sunnyvale.

Just look at this from a risk management perspective. Chance of aircraft being surprise-attacked in extremely well-defended airspace during peacetime: essentially zero. Consequences of that aircraft being surprise-attacked: loss of one aircraft and crew.

Chance of inadvertent release of weapons and/or countermeasures when switched on: apparently not zero, given the trainee's response. (An automatic response that I would be very, very, very pleased to see as an instructor!) Consequences: potential loss of civilian life and/or property.

So you have zero * (1 airplane + 1 crew), versus non-zero * (? civilians + ? buildings). I know which side of that inequality I'm landing on.

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On one side of the equation, where you've got zero (but it's not, it's just very close to zero) and the consequences may be your death of you don't act and are wrong.

It's like hearing gunshots outside the window of your house in your very safe hated community because someone thought it would be fun to prank you with a gun with blanks. Do you drive to the ground and maybe hurt yourself or knock some things over and damage them, or do you do nothing convinced that there's no way someone could be firing a gun close by?

I know what I'd do, and it's not the one that relies on a bunch of assumptions going against what the situation is presenting itself as when getting it wrong might mean my death.

> hated community

Freud would surely be proud.

Lol, Freud would have a field day with phone keyboard auto-corrections and fat-fingerings. :)

No one was making surprise attacks against Honolulu in 1940, either. The point of the military is to be credibly prepared for even low likelihood events (which, due to game theory, is what makes them low likelihood in the first place).

You don't arm switches like that in training unless over a suitable area, like the water. Combat is different, where you may keep it armed on TO and landing for the reason discussed.

There also weren’t reconnaissance satellites in 1941 that would detect some fleet leaving Vladivostok (or some western Chinese port). There weren’t over the horizon radars, or airborne interceptors with radar that can see hundreds of miles. It’s a completely different scenario in almost every way.

Finally, no current potential enemy state has the kind of aircraft carrier fleet needed to perform that the of attack. The U.K. and China both have two active carriers, but the Chinese are still training up. The Japanese launched about 300 planes from six carriers.

Nowadays, any surprise attack on the United States would be a counterforce launch of hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs with at most twenty minutes of warning to launch a response, and hours to launch a second strike, assuming command and control networks remained active.

What do you think does the risk-reward tradeooff look like between the risk of accidentally firing a live rocket in friendly territory and delayed response in an invasion that somehow managed to sneak by all early warning systems to the point where one unexpectant figher pilot has to intervene within milliseconds?

The only scenario after the invention of modern surveillance/detection mechanisms I can think of would have been 9/11 and in that case the problem wasn't reaction time but red tape, identification of compromised airplanes and willingness to shoot down civilian planes full of American citizens who might already be trying to recapture the plane.

To be fair, the planes at Pearl Harbor were arranged to prevent sabotage, which made them easier targets for an air attack. There are tradeoffs to every kind of preparedness.

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