Day: December 4, 2025

• A US Navy aircraft carrier made a hard turn to avoid enemy fire, sending a fighter jet overboard.
• The maneuver to avoid the Houthi missile attack surprised sailors, the investigation shows.
• The F/A-18’s brakes weren’t working properly, and it fell into the Red Sea along with a tow tractor.

A US Navy aircraft carrier’s hard evasive turn to avoid enemy missile fire caught crewmembers off guard and sent a $60 million F/A-18 Super Hornet rolling off the deck and into the Red Sea, an investigation into the fighter jet loss revealed.

The fighter’s brakes weren’t functioning properly, investigators found, allowing the jet to slide across the deck when the carrier USS Harry S. Truman abruptly changed course during the late April action.

Poor communication, bad brakes, and a slippery surface all contributed to the loss.

A tow tractor also fell into the water alongside the expensive F/A-18 fighter jet, the second of three that the Truman lost during a monthslong Middle East combat deployment. When it went over, it nearly took sailors overboard as well.

Evading enemy fire

During their deployment, the Truman and its strike group led Navy combat operations against the Houthis, the heavily armed Iran-backed rebel group in Yemen that spent more than a year attacking key Middle East shipping lanes.

On April 28, the move crew lost control of an F/A-18 under tow in the Truman’s hangar bay, a maintenance area below the flight deck, the Navy reported at the time, and both the jet and its tow tractor tumbled into the Red Sea.

Right before it fell in, a sailor jumped from the cockpit, suffering minor injuries. The Navy didn’t share information or insight into the warship’s situation at the time of the plane loss.

According to the command investigation, the fighter jet and the tractor fell overboard while the Truman was conducting evasive maneuvers to avoid an incoming medium-range ballistic missile fired by the Houthis, a detail that had been reported but not confirmed at the time.

The move crew, which was preparing the F/A-18 from Strike Fighter Squadron 136 (VFA-136), the “Knighthawks,” for planned flight operations, didn’t hear the announcement that the ship was making a hard turn and was caught unaware when the ship began to tilt.

Sailors had removed the chocks and chains to pull the F/A-18 into the hangar bay. With the brakes engaged but not actually working, there was nothing to hold the aircraft in place when the carrier heeled in an evasive turn.

It slid backward toward the deck edge, dragging the tow tractor behind it. The crew moving the Super Hornet abandoned their posts just before the fighter jet fell into the sea.

Bad brakes

The command investigation put the blame for the incident primarily on the fighter jet’s inadequate brake engagement and the lack of communication from the Truman’s bridge to flight deck control and the hangar bay.

Leadership also said that the non-skid, a rough, high-friction coating applied to the decks of Navy ships to keep people, vehicles, and aircraft from slipping on smooth steel surfaces, was ineffective, having not been replaced since 2018.

These problems, the investigation said, cost the Navy an F/A-18, a multirole fighter made by the US aerospace giant Boeing that has been in service with the Navy for decades.

The April incident was one of four major mishaps that the Truman and its strike group suffered during their deployment.

In December, the cruiser USS Gettysburg accidentally shot down one of the Truman’s F/A-18s in what the military described as a friendly fire incident. In February, the carrier collided with a cargo ship. And in May, the ship lost its third fighter jet after a landing failure caused it to slide off the flight deck and plunge into the sea.

• A US Navy warship fired missiles at two American F/A-18 fighter jets above the Red Sea last year.
• The warship mistook the fighter jets for Houthi cruise missiles, the investigation shows.
• One of the fighter jets was shot down. The other barely survived the friendly fire incident.

A US Navy pilot whose jet was mistakenly shot down by an American warship over the Red Sea told investigators he saw his life flash before his eyes before ejecting from the doomed aircraft.

The command investigation into the late December 2024 friendly fire incident, which Business Insider reviewed prior to its release on Thursday, reveals that the warship’s crew mistook two Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets for anti-ship cruise missiles fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

In a catastrophic failure, the cruiser USS Gettysburg launched surface-to-air missiles at both F/A-18s, shooting down one and nearly hitting the second. It also targeted a third friendly aircraft but never pulled the trigger.

A hit and a near-miss

The Gettysburg and the other warships in the strike group led by the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman deployed in September 2024 and entered the Red Sea three months later to take over Navy combat operations against the Iran-backed Houthis, who had for almost a year at that point been attacking key shipping lanes.

Early on December 22, just seven days after entering the Red Sea, the Gettysburg accidentally shot down a Super Hornet from the Truman’s air wing in what the US military described as “an apparent case of friendly fire.” Both aviators, the pilot and the weapons officer, ejected safely from the roughly $60 million fighter, part of Strike Fighter Squadron 11 (VFA-11), the “Red Rippers.”

The command investigation reveals that the friendly fire incident nearly resulted in a much larger disaster. While initial reports centered on the aircraft that was struck, the investigation reveals that a second narrowly avoided a catastrophic end, and a third was in the crosshairs.

As the first surface-to-air missile raced upward from the Gettyburg’s missile tubes, the pilot and weapons officer of the first jet assumed the weapon was chasing after a Houthi drone they hadn’t found, the investigation said.

They watched the missile climb and then suddenly change course. As the weapon rushed toward them, the pilot suddenly saw his life flash before his eyes, he told investigators. Seeing no other choice, the two-man team ejected just before the missile struck the plane.

In that chaotic moment, the Gettysburg fired another missile at a second American fighter jet. The aviators on board issued multiple mayday calls but opted to outmaneuver it rather than bail. The missile gave chase, course correcting in pursuit of the jet.

It narrowly missed, the jet shaking as it passed just a few feet away before burning out and exploding in the water.

A Navy helicopter commander who witnessed the incident told investigators his crew “saw the missile overhead and saw it flash.” They said there was no warning before the shot was taken.

The decision to shoot was ‘wrong’

As for what caused this disaster, the command investigation pointed to a series of failures, from shortcomings in the planning process to deficiencies in the Gettysburg’s combat systems, and noted that crew fatigue may have played a role.

Early in the deployment, the investigation said, the Navy identified “significant degradation” in the Gettysburg’s core interoperability system. Problems spanned network management, surveillance and tracking reporting, identification, mutual tracking, mission engagement, and weapons coordination.

During the first three months of the deployment, the Gettysburg and Truman were often separated. The cruiser had been fending off Houthi missiles and drones shortly before the friendly fire incident, and there appeared to be some confusion over whether the threat had concluded.

That said, the investigation assessed “the decisions to shoot were wrong when measured across the totality of information available” to Gettysburg’s commanding officer, who was constrained by a series of previous actions and decisions both in and beyond his control.

The captain had low situational awareness, and his combat information center team was unable to help him regain it, the investigation said.

This shootdown incident wasn’t the Red Sea battle’s only friendly fire incident, though it was the most serious. Earlier in the Red Sea conflict, in February 2024, a German warship accidentally targeted a US MQ-9 Reaper drone, but the missiles never reached it because the warship’s radar system suffered a technical malfunction.

The December 2024 friendly fire incident was one of four major mishaps that the Truman strike group experienced during its monthslong deployment in the Middle East.

The aircraft carrier collided with a cargo vessel in February and also lost two more F/A-18s to accidents — one fell off the side of the warship along with a tow tractor in April, and another experienced a failure while landing and slid off the flight deck in May.

In a statement Thursday, Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jim Kilby said that “the Navy is committed to being a learning organization,” adding that “these investigations reinforce the need to continue investing in our people to ensure we deliver battle-ready forces to operational commanders.”