Patriot Let a Scud Through ⏱️🚀

Описание: Patriot Let a Scud Through ⏱️🚀

On 25 February 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, a Patriot missile battery guarding Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, failed to track an incoming Iraqi Scud. The Scud hit a U.S. Army barracks and killed 28 American soldiers. The battery had been running for over 100 hours. Its clock counted tenths of a second, and converting that count to seconds in 24 bits lost a little more precision every hour, until the error reached about a third of a second and the radar looked 687 meters from the Scud. A software fix had been released on 16 February. It reached Dhahran the next day.

Source:
GAO, Patriot Missile Defense: Software Problem Led to System Failure at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (GAO/IMTEC-92-26, 4 Feb 1992): https://www.gao.gov/products/imtec-92-26
The launcher, radar, range-gate box, message strip, crate and counters are our simplified reconstructions, not photos of the real battery. Night Earth: NASA Black Marble. Crate and sand: Poly Haven (CC0). Stock clips: cottonbro studio, Stefan and Reiner Pfesdorf on Pexels.

Narration: AI voice. New postmortems every week.

#shorts #history #softwareengineering