At the time the allies blamed each other for the tragedy.

The Patriot criticisms are expected to be of particular concern to the Pentagon and allied forces because Patriots also shot down a US Navy F-18 aircraft over Iraq on April 2, 2003, killing its pilot, Lt. Nathan White. Patriots nearly shot down another F-18, and so threatened a U.S. F-16 that its pilot fired his own missile at the Patriot in self-defense. The U.S. Army has not yet released the conclusions of its own investigations.

With the British report also concluding that Patriot firing and doctrine were inadequate, it appears to open fundamental questions about the use of the $6 billion system, currently being sold by Raytheon to many countries in Europe and Asia. At least one U.S. investigation has suggested that, contrary to initial claims of success, Patriots failed to shoot down most of the Iraqi missiles they were designed for.

The key problem for the Patriot battery, based in Kuwait to watch out for Iraqi ballistic missiles fired at coalition forces still pouring over the border into Iraq on March 23, 2003, was that it failed to pick up the Tornado's encrypted Mode 4 Identification Friend and Foe (IFF) electronic signal as it descended to land after attacking anti-aircraft sites near Baghdad.

This was, according to the RAF report released Friday, because of a flaw in the aircraft's IFF equipment, which failed to warn the aircrew that the system had suffered a complete power failure. The system was proved to be working before takeoff, but once airborne was reported later by various radar units tracking the major U.S.-RAF strike on Baghdad not to have worked again. With no warnings and almost within sight of Ali al Salem airbase in Kuwait, Flight Lieutenants Kevin Main and David Williams were killed instantly by the Patriot missile.

That IFF failure, however, was only one contributing cause of the shoot-down. Just as important, the RAF report says, the Patriot should have picked up the Tornado's Mode 1 IFF, an unencrypted code used by all coalition aircraft in Iraq. But the Patriot battery did not have the codes loaded to be able to receive any aircraft's Mode 1 "squawk."

The missile system thought it was being attacked by an anti-radiation missile coming at it and had no Iraq-specific data to caution that with no Iraqi aircraft flying such a threat was unlikely. The RAF board concluded that the generic anti-radiation missile classification criteria programmed into the system was a contributing cause of the accident.

Furthermore, the Patriot battery had arrived in Kuwait a only a month earlier. Its communications suite was still on its way from the United States, and its contacts with the outside world was through a relay with another battery that did have links to battalion headquarters. Working autonomously, "the Patriot crew did not have access to the widest possible 'picture' of the airspace around them to build situational awareness," said the report in diplomatic language that was used frequently by a senior RAF official in briefing reporters.

The Patriot crew had about one minute to decide whether to fire under the system's too-taut rules of engagement, the report said. If they had delayed firing, the Tornado "would probably have been reclassified as its flight path changed" and the disaster avoided. The report blamed crew training and a firing doctrine that required implicit faith in the Patriot's technology.

As a result of the accident, the RAF is speeding introduction of a new successor Identification Friend or Foes system onto 40 Tornado GR4 aircraft and 27 Tornado F3 fighters by the end of the year, with all RAF aircraft fitted by 2007.

Among its 12 recommendations are that closer coordination is needed on planning and operations between the United States and the UK in the use of airspace and that the two nations work more closely in combined air operations centers.

The senior RAF official denied suggestions that there might be cultural differences between the way the British and Americans operate, or that the Americans' had a "shoot first, ask questions later" attitude than has not much improved since the USS Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus with 270 passengers over the Persian Gulf in 1988.

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