Civilian plane comes under missile attack on northern Iraq

Two years ago it appeared that defending civilian aviation against sholuder-mounted missiles would be one of the big-ticket items on DHS’s agenda: The department’s FY 2006 counter MANPADS (for Man-Portable Air Defense Systems) nearly doubled to $110 million (up 80.3 percent over the previous year). Two teams, one led by BAE Systems and one led by Northrop Grumman, received funding of approximately $45 million each for an eighteen-month final prototype phase of the program. The department — and Congress — were not exactly impressed with what these two large defense contractors had to offer: Both produce missile-defense systems for military aircraft, but modifying these systems for civilian aircraft proved problematic. The cost of equipping the 8,000 or so jumbo jets currently in operation in the United States with either BAE’s or Northrop’s systems — and maintaining these systems — was calculated to reach a staggering $100 billion over ten years or so. Moreover, the sheer weight of the systems would have added considerably to the fuel consumption of the planes being defended, something of great concern in an era of rising energhy prices. Most U.S. airlines operate at — or near — bankruptcy, which meant that the Amercian tax payer would have had to fund the systems. DHS is now looking into a different system, configured around satellites and UAVs. We will write about it in greater detail in the future.

Those who try to do harm to civilan aviations, though, are not waiting. The New York Times’s C. J. Chivers reports that the European civil aviation authority said it was reviewing security conditions at airports in northern Iraq after two pilots reported late last week that their passenger airliner had been attacked by ground fire last week while taking off from Sulaimaniya. The plane, a McDonnell Douglas MD-83 operated by Nordic Airways and carrying more than 120 people, was not struck and continued to Stockholm. Its pilots have told investigators, however, that they saw the flash and light of a missile rise from the ground, arc near the plane and then drop away as they climbed between 3,000 and 6,000 feet, said Anders Lundblad, a spokesman for Luftfartsstyrelsen, the civil aviation authority in Sweden, where Nordic Airways is registered.

Just one commercial airplane, a DHL cargo carrier, is known to have been struck by a missile in Iraq, in November 2003, when the plane landed in Baghdad with its left wing in flames. At least thirty-four helicopters have been shot down, according to a tally by the Brookings Institution, including a CH-46 Marine helicopter brought down by a surface-to-air missile in February 2007, killing seven people. Those attacks have been clustered around the center of the country, and the events in Sulaimaniya could be the first indication that insurgent efforts to disrupt Western air transport have moved north. The suspicion that there had been missile fire was a potential blow to the reputation and economy of the Kurdish region, and Kurdish officials disputed the contention that the plane came under fire.

Two Swedish aviation companies have operated regular routes serving Sulaimaniya and Erbil, the international airports in northern Iraq. On Friday, all Swedish flights to the region were suspended indefinitely.