Defending U.S. civilian aircraft against shoulder-fired missile may cost $43 billion
added protection, said David Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents airlines including Delta Air Lines Inc., American and UAL Corp.’s United Airlines.
“We don’t support the installation” of the systems, Castelveter told Keane. “They represent only one possible deterrent of a number of ways in which to attack Americans.”
If Congress required equipping airplanes with a defense system, the Washington-based airline association would want the United States to pay all costs, including maintenance, Castelveter said.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) canceled Delta’s plan for flights to Kenya and Liberia a year ago, citing the threat of shoulder-fired missiles, the DHS’s S&T said in the report dated 30 March.
In November 2002, terrorists linked to al Qaeda fired at and missed an Israeli jet talking off from Mombasa, Kenya. The next year, a missile struck a DHL International cargo plane taking off from Baghdad’s airport, wrecking the plane while the crew survived.
The missiles are five-feet (1.52 meters) long, weigh 35 pounds (15.9 kilograms), and could easily be smuggled into the United States, said Schroeder of the Federation of American Scientists, which also works against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
“Just because attacks have occurred in war zones or near war zones thus far doesn’t mean that will be the case in the future,” he told Keane.
Russia and China have developed missiles that the BAE and Northrop technology would combat, while Iran, North Korea, and Eritrea are among countries that traffic in the weapons, Schroeder said. “The values for black-market missiles range from about $500 to about $250,000,” he said.
The technology for passenger planes is prone to breakdowns, and a lack of reliability may delay flights or result in cancellations unless airlines are permitted to defer maintenance, DHS says in the report.
The BAE and Northrop systems “currently fall short” of reliability requirements measuring their “ability to perform as designed in the operational environment without any failures,” the report finds. “This shortfall results in increased spares and maintenance costs.”
Doubling reliability would reduce the $43 billion cost of the systems by $10 billion over 20 years, according to the report.
The findings on reliability and maintenance are based on tests completed in 2007, Jack Pledger, spokesman for Los Angeles-based Northrop, told Keane.
Since then, Northrop has upgraded its system, called Guardian, producing 1,750 units now installed on 500 planes among 50 different types of aircraft in the U.S. Air Force fleet and those of U.S. allies, Pledger said. “All those concerns about reliability have been addressed,” he said.
BAE, based in London, said it has a maintenance system to reduce the upkeep costs of its technology. BAE’s Jeteye system completed more than 2,000 hours of flight tests without failure on American Airlines flights from New York to Los Angeles, Program Director Burt Keirstead said in an e-mailed statement.
