Officials downplay the future of counter-MANPAD technologies
Despite $45 million to Northrop Grumman and BAE, little enthusiasm exists for full deployment; planners are unwilling to commit in face of rocket-propelled grenade and machine gun risks; cost remains a major issue as wll
You do the math: There are about 10,000 large passenger planes operating around the world (6,800 of them in the United States). There are more than 500,000 shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft missiles (or MANPADS, for man-portable air defense systems) around the world, many tens of thousands of them available on the black market. The intelligence community says that 24 of the 27 listed terrorist organizations have such missiles in their possession. The MANPADS were designed to bring down a military fighter plane. Shooting down, say, a Boeing 747 is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. Little wonder, then, that governments and security authorities have been anxiously toying with ideas on how best to defend civilian aviation from the menace of MANPADS.
We have reported on many of these efforts. Northrop Grumman and BAE have received $45 million from DHS to adapt for civilian use the laser-based defenses currently used on military craft. Raytheon, considering that planes are mainly vulnerable at landing and take-off, is developing a ground-based system that protects the airspace above an airport rather than individual craft. Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) has developed a chaff-based system which, last December, was installed on all El Al planes, while Swedish company Saab has developed a system which squirts a chemical in the path of the climbing missile to divert it.
Despite these efforts, there are good reasons to be pessimistic about counter-MANPAD systems, both as a business and as a defensive measure. Cost is one of them: DHS has set a target cost of $1 million per airplane, and some studies have estimated that equipping the entire U.S. commercial fleet with such devices could cost as much as $7 billion and take twenty years to complete. These problems might be overcome with a breakthrough in technology. More worrisome, says Thomas Blank, former deputy administrator at the Transportation Safety Administration, is that “despite three years of government-funded research and development, there is no public policy consensus.” According to Blank, policymakers are reluctant to single out MANPADS as a distinctive threat, especially considering that machine guns and rocket-propeled grenades also pose a threat to commercial airliners.
-read more in John Doyle’s Aviation Daily report
