MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

How Argentines sank HMS Coventry.

An in-depth investigation on how four ageing Argentine attack aircraft sank the missile-armed destroyer HMS Coventry at a critical stage in the 1982 Falklands War has been shown on British television in the Channel Four programme “Going Critical”.

The lessons learned that day, the programme says, altered the fighting tactics and equipment of navies throughout the world.

The Coventry and the type 22 frigate, HMS Broadsword, were on guard duty to spring a "missile trap" against Argentine aircraft attacking vulnerable vessels landing British troops at San Carlos, in what the British called "Bomb Alley" and the Argentines "Death Valley". Up to then, the two warships had been successful in shooting down aircraft themselves and directing Harrier aircraft from HMS Hermes to destroy incoming aircraft.

With archive material and the help of the two captains, David Hart-Dyke of Coventry and Bill Canning of Broadsword, their operations commanders, and the Argentine pilot whose bombs sank the destroyer, the television documentary has re-enacted the events of that fatal day for the doomed British warship. It was coincidentally May 25th, Argentina's National Day.

Old aircraft versus modern missiles

How, the programme makers, ask could four 28-year-old American-built Sky Hawk aircraft, with old-fashioned free-fall bombs, take on and render ineffective two modern British warships armed with the sophisticated Sea Dart and very modern Sea Wolf missile systems, which were meant to complement each other to provide a fool-proof defence against air attack?

The answer lies n a series of incidents in which the warships' radar and missiles systems failed at the critical moment, and in the positions of the low-flying Argentine aircraft and of the British ships, which got in each other's way.

Coventry's Sea Dart system was capable of shooting down approaching aircraft forty miles away. But by flying very low and playing hide and seek along the rugged Falklands coastline, the aircraft fooled the warships 909 lock-on radar which was baffled by the much larger radar signal given off by the land mass. Because the radar could not lock on to its targets, the missiles could not fire.

Two of the aircraft dropped four bombs on Broadsword. Three missed but the frigate was hit and damaged by one of them, which shot right across its deck but failed to explode. Broadsword's Sea Wolf close-range missiles had failed when a computer froze. But the computer was working