> However, I think it's unreasonable to expect them to design a perfect system for a highly volatile and chaotic use case such as war.
When it comes to safety-critical systems, the right engineering choice is to lean towards a 'safe' default. For example, the safe default would be to always slave the cursor:
> Once "hooked," the contact would be tracked by Aegis. But critically, unless the operator took the additional step of "slaving" the cursor to that contact, as the contact moved away the cursor would not follow it.
And here, don't reassign a tracking number, at least not within in a short timeframe:
> Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.
> the safe default would be to always slave the cursor
I don't think so, I imagine that behavior could be frustrating, e.g. if you're cursoring over many contacts. Admittedly I am not an expert either, but that suggestion smells like a classic case of armchair design that would actually cause more problems, because I imagine that the two modes exist for a reason and the designers intentionally chose which default to use, but they didn't anticipate this user error.
Thus, I'd suggest that the UI should have made it extremely obvious whether the cursor was slaved and when a contact gets hooked/unhooked under the cursor.
If I had to make an analogy, I'd compare it to normal and insert mode in Vi(m). The fact that the default is normal mode actually makes sense even though new users may suggest otherwise, but the real problem is that by default it's hard to tell which mode you are in.
> The next aircraft taking off on that runway was an Iranian military F-14 fighter. The cursor was only left on the runway for around 90 seconds, but that was long enough for the Vincennes to get an IFF response corresponding to a military fighter. So Flight 655 was reclassified from an unknown contact to a potentially hostile one.
The default was that the automated system conflated two completely distinct aircraft. The IFF ("identification friend or foe") for a military aircraft was attributed to a civilian airliner
When it comes to safety-critical systems, the right engineering choice is to lean towards a 'safe' default. For example, the safe default would be to always slave the cursor:
> Once "hooked," the contact would be tracked by Aegis. But critically, unless the operator took the additional step of "slaving" the cursor to that contact, as the contact moved away the cursor would not follow it.
And here, don't reassign a tracking number, at least not within in a short timeframe:
> Vincennes assigned her the tracking number 4474; Sides assigned her 4131. Aegis unified the contacts under the number 4131. 4474 was then available for re-use, so Aegis assigned it to a US A-6 bomber, which happened to be descending.