AutonomousCritical
Patriot Missile System Misclassified US Navy Aircraft, Killing Pilot Upon Approval to Fire
- Occurred
- Apr 2, 2003
- Published
- May 20, 2004
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
US Navy's Patriot missile system misidentified an American Navy F/A-18C Hornet as an enemy projectile, prompting an operator to fire two missiles at the aircraft, which killed the pilot.
Developers
- Raytheon
- Lockheed Martin
Deployers
- US Navy
Harmed parties
- US Navy
- Nathan White's family
- Nathan White
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 100%
Rationale: Autonomous defense system misidentification led to pilot death.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8