Another article on Missiles. LA Times.
COMMENTARY
Add One to Perils of Flying
Missiles are only the latest unmet threat to airliners.
By James P. Pinkerton
December 3 2002
So why hasn't a shoulder-fired missile attack against a civilian passenger plane like Thursday's attempt on the Israeli plane in Mombasa, Kenya, happened sooner? Actually, it has; we just weren't paying attention.
And that's been the story of American homeland security: It takes awhile for us to figure out that we're in a new phase in the war on terrorism -- or, more precisely, terrorism's war on us.
The downing of a plane carrying the president of Rwanda in 1994 was most likely the result of what the Pentagon calls a man-portable air defense system. The shooting down of a domestic flight in Sri Lanka in 1998 was certainly the result of such a weapon. Last week, the Israelis got lucky; both missiles missed their target, a passenger jet.
Or was it luck? Some speculate that the Israeli plane might have had counter-measures on board. If that's true, all the more reason to get on the stick, security-wise, because if terrorists figure they can't hit an Israeli plane, they might aim for an American one.
So now comes the test for U.S. homeland security. The politicians agree that an attack is coming sooner or later, probably sooner. But what will the federal government do about it?
One obvious answer is to order the installation of defensive antimissile systems -- such as decoy flares to fool heat-seeking missiles -- on every American plane. But the airlines, mostly broke, will blanch at the cost. Indeed, isn't this an appropriate task for the federal government? The estimated cost for installing defensive systems is $2 million to $3 million per plane.
Multiplied by the 7,000 or so planes in the U.S. commercial aviation fleet, that works out to a dollar total in the low 11 digits, about what Uncle Sugar doles out to farmers in crop subsidies every year.
Of course, one never knows what's coming next. A vital asset in any kind of war is the element of surprise, and the terrorists have it.
John McDannel, who just retired after nearly four decades as a pilot for the Air Force and then for United Airlines, recalls that the pilots aboard the four jets hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, were following long-established rules. "The standard operating procedure was to not resist the hijackers," he notes. "Nobody had imagined that they would turn the planes into bombs."
McDannel is right, to be sure, on how the government thought about the danger. But such by-the-book thinking was, in itself, a failure of imagination. The idea of using airplanes as suicide bombs is as old as the Japanese kamikazes of World War II.
Indeed, Paul Rancatore, an Air Force veteran who had the experience of being shot at by shoulder-fired missiles when he flew over Mogadishu, Somalia, in the early 1990s, notes that whatever countermeasure we install on planes could be trumped by the next generation of missiles. So what to do?
Rancatore, who now flies for American Airlines, rattles off a long list of unmet security needs that represent, he believes, even higher priorities for the future. Like the need to start screening cargo and food catering, to better guard the perimeters of airports and to establish minimal background checks for airport service workers and on-site construction workers.
Rancatore notes that some progress has been made in recent months. Many cockpit doors are now intruder-proofed, and plans are afoot, over the objection of the Bush administration, to arm pilots.
Pilots have a morbid name for those safety systems put in place after an aviation disaster: "tombstone technology." Of course, in fairness, that's how most people learn, by getting burned once. But now the question is whether the U.S., having been burned many times on airline safety, will finally get serious about doing what it takes to make flying safer--or whether the skies will rain down more tombstones.
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