UAVs to protect US airports

Published 15 March 2007

DHS chooses an unexpected technology for its counter-MANPAD effort; but is it safe?

Defense Daily got the story first: DHS is closely examining a proposal to use UAVs to protect commercial aircraft against man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), or shoulder-fired missiles. — the so-called Project Chloe. Under the scheme, unofficially announced recently by Admiral Jay Cohen, the drones would cycle in and out of airport airspace 24 hours a day, using an infared device to spot missile launches. At that point, said Cohen, the UAV would then emit a beam to either blind or distract the UAV. “Will it work? I don’t know, but we’re going to do it,” Cohen told a homeland security technology summit sponsored by Equity International. Aviation Week provided the details.

The question is: will it work? Until the official DHS release, we hesitate to pass judgement on the plan’s technical merits, but the very fact that DHS seems leaning towards a UAV project suggests that the agency is being more careful about price. The estimated cost of using plane=mounted or airport-based defenses to protect the 6800 planes in American airspace is estimated at $6-11 billion, and neither the airline industry nor the congress has shown much interest in paying the bill. Longtime readers know we have not been overwhelmed by earlierproposed solutions to the MANPAD problem, but the UAV project should at least be comparitvely inexpensive. In fact, Cohen has even thought of how the system could turn a profit. Cellular phone companies, he said, would build out the required transmission networks and “pay the operations and maintenance” in exchange for access to an assured transponder.

We offer only one caveat: considering the high rates of UAV crashes, will cities go along?