Transcript of Two US Navy pilots ejected safely after their fighter jet was shot down over the Red Sea

Well, MJ and Victor, a lot of questions here after this apparent case of friendly fire, according to US Central Command, left one US fighter jet down. And so many questions early Saturday morning. What we know is this US Navy F-A-18 fighter jet was operating from the USS Harry S. Truman, and it was mistakenly fired upon by the USS Gettysburg. Now, when that jet was shot down, both pilots were able to eject safely, but one crew member sustained minor injuries. Of course, so many questions now. This incident is now under investigation by the US military, and questions about how this could have happened, as CENTCOM emphasizes, this was not the result of hostile fire. Of course, this incident took place over the Red Sea, where the US has moved warships and fighter jets and other assets in recent months amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East. In a sign of the activity in this area, this incident comes the exact same as the US carried out airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. Now, the US struck a missile storage facility and a command and control facility in the capital of Sanaa. During that operation, the US also shot down one-way attack drones and an anti-ship cruise missile, according to CENTCOM.

Now, those attacks also involved US Navy FA-18 fighter jets and US Air Force assets, according to CENTCOM. But two US military officials tell CNN that this down The fighter jet we have talked about in this incident was not a part of those strikes, MJ and Victor.

Betson Line Force at the White House. Thank you so much. Let's bring in now CNN military analyst and retired Air Force Colonel Cedric Layton. Colonel, good morning to you. The investigation will determine how this mistake happened, but typically, how do these types of mistakes happen?

Yeah, Victor, good morning. One of the big things here is that you have a very big airspace that they're dealing with. And in that airspace, there's a lot of activity, especially when there's a carrier battle group active like there is in the Red Sea with the USS Harry Truman, which is where the F-18 came from. When you are in a zone like this where there is combat happening at one end of the Red Sea, and then there are other flight patterns that the folks on the USS Gettysburg, the sailors on the USS Gettysburg, have to deal with, it can be pretty easy to mistake take targets from one to the other. In other words, is one a friendly target or is one an adversarial or a potential adversarial target? So what the investigation is going to look at is what the people, the sailors, the who were manning the positions on the USS Gettysburg, what they saw, what they believed was coming toward them, if in fact the aircraft was heading toward them, why they saw it as a potential hostile aircraft, and why they fired. So this is going to be a critical piece.

And in these situations, what they saw, what they believed to be the case is going to be a key part of that. What the radar picture looked like for them is also going to be a factor. And of course, they'll need to answer why they didn't deflip the aircraft properly.

And what we also learned is that this fighter jet was mistakenly hit, and then the two Navy pilots ejected protected from their jet. I mean, is this how the ejection system, if you can call it that, is that how it's supposed to work? Or typically, would you see something like this coming? And then before you're hit, you're supposed to get yourself out of the fighter jet.

Yeah, MJ, one of the key things here is that pilots always stay with their aircraft until they can't maneuver the aircraft. So what basically happened in this particular case is not atypical for a situation like this. In essence, what you have is you have a missile coming toward you. If you can evade that missile, you're going to do everything you can to not only save yourself, but save the aircraft. If your aircraft gets hit, that's when you eject. And that's exactly what these pilots, these crew members, followed in this particular case, those procedures.

Colonel, should we have expected that there would have been some opportunity to communicate between the Gettysburg and these two pilots before this happened, that they could have identified themselves?

Yes, absolutely. That's also going to be one key aspect of the investigation, why the crew on the USS Gettysburg did not see this aircraft as a friendly aircraft. There was supposed to be communication between not only the pilots and the aircraft carrier, in essence, their controllers in this case, but also with all the other naval assets in the region. What was communicated to the USS Gettysburg is going to be a critical part of what this investigation finds, whether or not that communication it clear whether it was something that they mistook for something else and why they mistook it for a potential hospital target. That's the thing that is going to be part of the investigation. So yes, communication, what it was, how it was lacking, If that's the case, that's going to be part of the investigation.

Colonel, I was struck before when you were saying that it's actually easy enough to mistake targets in this fashion. You know how much activity there has been in the Red Sea, basically since October seventh, heightened hostilities, the back and forth. Was it actually just a matter of time, in your view, until we had an incident like this, given how much activity we've seen there?

Yeah, you want to give a cruise in this area, in a very tense area of the world, a lot of credit for doing what they do. We certainly would expect when you look at the kinds of accident rates that the Navy and the Air Force have in situations like this, that something like this could happen. But the procedures that are in place within the US Navy and within all aspects of the US military, especially in the CENTCOM, area of responsibility, are actually pretty extensive. They're pretty tight procedures, and they're designed to avoid incidents like that. When a situation like this occurs, obviously something went wrong. Whether or not you would have expected something like this, that depends on what exactly went wrong. But, MJ, when you look at the totality of this, it is certainly clear that an accident like this could certainly happen, and we are lucky that it hasn't happened before.

Yeah, that's interesting in the conversation about communication. When miscommunication results in an FAA team being shot down and two pilots détecting, of course, SENTOM tells us. But when these types of miscommunications that has happened and they don't reach this level of severity, I mean, how common is that?

Yeah, each crew on each ship is going to probably have different statistics when it comes to that. But yes, it is something that does happen where at first people think that there's an incoming target to them, and you have to think these aircraft are moving at a very high speed. When When you are sitting in a guided missile cruiser and you're looking at what is happening on your radar scopes and you see what is coming toward you, the potential for misidentification is actually quite high. And that's where training comes in. They look at the types of aircraft, they look at their characteristics, they look at the airspeed. They look at those kinds of things and use that to help determine whether or not what they're seeing on the radar is accurate. And of course, they also look at the intelligence picture and try to de-flict with that. So these kinds of things do happen, and this identifications are very often corrected just in time before an incident like this, as bad as this is, before an incident like this All right, Colonel Cedric Leighton, thank you so much.

Happy holidays.