On 14, April 1994, a tragic and avoidable accident occurred over the skies of Northern Iraq when two US Army helicopters were mistakenly shot down by two US Air Force F-15s and twenty-six persons were killed. Reports from the investigation indicate that a number of factors contributed to the accidental shootdown. Most prominent among these factors was the visual mis-identification of the Black Hawk helicopters. Visual identification training programs in the Air Force and across the Department of Defense had changed little from their inception a half century earlier and needed overhaul to avoid the symptomatic repetition of incidents such as that of the Black Hawk shootdown. This paper outlines the successful approach taken to insure the swift, appropriate, instructional and software design, development, implementation and evaluation of the needed training intervention titled Joint Visual Identification (JVID) training system.