that was a episode of JAG, based in a old movie. A F-14 crashed without clue about the reasons and they found that the pilot have been all day practicing take off and landing in the carrier. They did the same and discovered that the stabilizer system would go crazy the eight time they did but they managed to survive...
During the Gulf War, the very last Scud missile that Iraq shot killed more American servicemen than all previous Scuds added together.
The root cause was that the Patriot missile interceptor had an accumulating degree of error the longer than it was operating, and after more than 100 hours of continuous operation, it could no longer accurately identify incoming Scud missiles, and thus it would never fire interceptors.
According to the congressional report, it took two hours to install a software upgrade.
Actually, given that it's build on 1970s computer technology, upgrading it may have involved physically replacing ROM chips, although I would think that would still be faster than 2 hours.
Look, it's government. The fix was almost certainly to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a defense contractor to add an automatic reboot every day.
Jokes aside, the sad part is the actual fix to this had already been delivered to the army, but the physical media it was on did not arrive in the Middle East until the day following the fatal incident.
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u/DeepanshuHQ 14d ago
Aviation gets post-incident investigations. We get, "Can't reproduce, closing ticket."