IFF use it Data Link...

[jester224]

Now some of us have in the past when first joining may have accidently shot down the odd tanker or two. At last you can put this all to rest and use IFF with SA and datalink to give you a much clearer picture. How are here you wonderful people cry! Fairly simple although I will attach a little YouTube video about it to make visually explain it.

it works like this. An airborne contact can be essentially one of three states. Friendly, Unknown or Hostile. For an aircraft to appear hostile you have to have to sources confirming this. One could be your EW and the other is a radar based system that looks at the target radar signature and identifies the target aircraft type. or you can have a second source on the datalink identify the target as hostile. In the video it explains much better than I can about this.

SA and IFF Video Link