A note for Nightwatch and technothriller authors

[Robert_Moriyama]

(MANPADS = Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems, e.g. Stinger anti-aircraft missiles; hence Counter-MANPADS would be countermeasures (chaff, flares, radar jammers, etc. Nightbird One and Nightbird Five presumably carry this type of defensive gear.)

Waiting Game
Counter-MANPADS are almost ready as testing continues in the face of industry opposition.

By Jerome Greer Chandler
Air Transport World, October 2008, p.50

THE GREAT ANTI-MANPADS DEBATE is in abeyance just now. Perhaps it is the US's success in helping destroy some 26,000 of the shoulder-fired devices since 2003. Maybe it is the US State Dept.'s efforts to keep those that remain out of the hands of bad guys. Then, just maybe, there's pure, undiluted luck. In any event, no passengers on a regularly scheduled flight have died from a Man-Portable Air Defense System attack since Oct. 10, 1998, when Tutsi rebels downed a Lignes Aerinnes Congolaises 727-100, killing 41. Since the mid-1970s, State Dept. records indicate there has not been a successful MANPADS attack on a commercial airliner outside of a war zone.

The operant word is successful. On Nov. 28, 2002, terrorists loosed two Strella 7s at an Arkia Israeli Airlines 757-200 just as it was taking off from Mombassa. There were 271 people onboard. The missiles missed and the aircraft was unharmed. It was the post-9/11 Mombassa attack that triggered the warning light in Congress's collective cockpit, prompting a three-phase program to evaluate just how well counter-MANPADS technology works in the civil environment. Whatever these tests show, the US airline industry remains opposed to fitting airliners and cargo aircraft with detection and deterrent devices.

"Our opposition has not changed," says David Castelveter, VP-communications for the Air Transport Assn. "Counter-MANPADS technology is an inefficient use of government's limited resources." Better, contend some, that government focus on ferreting out antagonists before lethal tubes land in their hands. "[They] should be interdicted through intelligence," says American Airlines spokesperson John Hotard. Right now, the only way AA would consider flying counter-MANPADS outside a subsidized test environment is in a Civil Reserve Air Fleet role.

The US government itself, at least the Dept. of Homeland Security, "does not have a position of advocating for or against this technology," says DHS spokesperson Amy Kudwa. "What we're doing . . . is testing the feasibility of using this technology for commercial aviation."

One set of operational tests recently wound up, another just started. Together they comprise phase three of DHS's initiative. Phase one looked at paper proposals and helped winnow vendor competition. Phase two put gear on airplanes and flew them over test ranges. Phase three will determine how well the systems stand up to the rigors of regular service. In 2007, Northrop Grumman and FedEx evaluated counter-MANPADS technology on MD-10s. BAE Systems and ABX conducted laboratory and flight tests in the same year. In late 2006, Congress anteed up $35 million to test countermeasure technology on passenger aircraft. BAE Systems is the vendor, a trio of AA 767s the testbeds.

Kudwa says DHS is taking the parallel-track approach--cargo and passenger--because the aircraft, although similar, are "flown in very different ways." The government wants to know how daily operations impact overall system maintenance, reliability and carrier costs. System weight, aerodynamic drag and fuel burn "are very important considerations," she says, "particularly in the current environment."

BAE's Jeteye rig weighs some 500 lb., the approximate heft of 2.5 paying passengers. This might not have mattered too much five years ago, but now it's critical. Somewhat mitigating that weight, says Laurie Nuzzo, Jeteye's program manager, is that it is distributed around the aircraft, with four infrared sensors on the ventral side of the fuselage and wings and a jamhead aft on the belly. "It's very low drag," she says. "It extends no more than a foot."

FedEx tests began in January 2006. Before they were over, Northrop Grumman had modified 11 FedEx MD-10s to carry its purpose-built Guardian DIRCM (directional infrared countermeasures) pod. Then it monitored them in normal revenue service. "When I say 'normal,'" says Jack Pledger, director-IRCM business development, "that's exactly what [happened]." The aircraft flew regular routes within the US. There were "no special provisions. No special training for people on the ground. No special equipment in the field."

The challenge? "How do you make it seamlessly work in the airline industry," says Paul Handwerker, BAE Systems VP-business development, Electronic Warfare Systems. Reliability is critical. If pilots can set and forget the system, so too should maintenance.

BAE Systems' proximate MTBF goal for its Jeteye system is 3,000 hr. It isn't there yet. Consider that the US military criteria are "way less than 200, or even 100, hours," says Handwerker, and the task is put in perspective. "The airline guys look for bad actors as to what's keeping their fleets on the ground. We know we're not going to satisfy [them] until we get into the 10,000 [MTBF] range. That's how they trained us . . .

We never want to be seen as being a problem."

In the 14 months that Northrop Grumman and FedEx flew Guardian, "We actually exceeded our predicted reliability," says Pledger. DHS prevents him from disclosing the numbers, but he says the Air Mobility Command is racking up more than 600 hr. MTBF in the system's military guise. Air Force specs call for 150 hr.

The FedEx test took in 23,000 operational hr. of which 10,000 comprised actual flight time, some 4,500 sorties in all. But while the test was rigorous, the operational environment wasn't necessarily reflective of the way things would work were the system deployed. "It's very difficult to get an accurate reflection of what the reliability would be if it had been in actual commercial service," asserts Pledger. "The reason is we didn't buy any spare parts for it." When a system evidenced problems, Northrop Grumman pulled it. Repair wasn't a priority because the military variant of Guardian was protecting airplanes in Iraq and "we took care of those airplanes first."

BAE Systems intends to gather 7,000 hr. of data from Jeteye's AA 767 operations. The -200s will ply the transcon from New York JFK to the West Coast. While this isn't exactly high-cycle flying, AA and BAE Systems want to find out "how it holds up," says Hotard. "Mainly you're looking at landings."


How They Work

The Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems setups are predicated on passive ultraviolet and infrared detection. The idea is to identify heat signatures from incoming missiles and disable them with a laser. Mindful that regulators get antsy when airliners mimic Klingon Birds of Prey and blow things up, Pledger says Guardian's "eye-safe" laser isn't intended to destroy. Instead it projects a jamming signal that "disrupts the missile guidance, breaks the lock of the seeker." Acquisition and interdiction "all happens within two to three seconds." The process is automatic. Pilots aren't in the loop. Because MANPADS attacks happen relatively close to the ground, crew reaction times would be too slow.

Both Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems say their gear can handle multiple missiles. "The laser can handle simultaneous or near-simultaneous launches," says Handwerker. The system "identifies which missile poses the highest threat, the second highest and so forth. In sequence, it points the laser. This happens immediately."

While Northorp Grumman has both the detection and laser interdiction components of its solution up and running in Operation Iraqi Freedom, BAE Systems just has the detection part flying military ops. Currently it employs flares to decoy MANPADS in a military setting. This will change when its military variant of DIRCM goes operational. "We love flares," says Handwerker, "but they're like munitions." And FARs say commercial airliners and munitions don't mix.


Flare Fear

That's what's blocking one key vendor's entry into the US market. "They're still afraid of flares," says Baruch Reshef, deputy director-marketing for ELTA, a subsidiary of Israeli Aerospace Industries. In late 2005, Israel's Civil Aviation Authority authorized Flight Guard's use on 767s. It has been reported (although neither ELTA nor El Al will confirm it) that the system is flying on a half-dozen of El Al's 767s.

The ELTA solution employs radar to detect incoming missiles and "black flares" to throw the threat off target. Reshef says radar can measure the velocity of the missile, the distance giving the system "much more confidence as to whether it's a real target and not just a false alarm." Differentiating benign ground-based heat sources from incoming missile plumes has been one of the prime challenges heat-sensing DIRCM systems have had to overcome.

The problem with radar detection, contend competing vendors, is that it can interfere with navigational gear. As for interdiction, Reshef says black flares go directly from solid state into gas. "They have no residual sparks capable of causing fires," he insists.

Will FAA eventually certify Flight Guard, a system Reshef maintains is more cost-effective than DIRCM? "It depends on politics," he says. US regulators are still "not happy with the radar solution, [nor] with black flares."

And so it is that passive detection and friendly lasers are the subject of testing. But just because counter-MANPADS performs in a civil context doesn't mean the stuff will be sitting on the shelf ready to go in a crisis. "The problem is," says Pledger, "if you were to turn on a program right now to put these on airplanes, it will be a year before the first system pops out the other end." It's not as if Northrop Grumman would have to start from scratch; it's already building Guardian for the military. It's just that the logistical tail entails marshalling "special optics . . . special cameras."

Nuzzo puts the first output timeframe at 14 months. "Then there would be a progressive ramp-up in volume, depending on need," he says.

DHS-mandated economics make it hard to manufacture counter-MANPADS, put them on the shelf and wait for some benighted soul to get a 777 in his sights. DHS says industry has to be able to turn them out for $1 million per aircraft by the time production reaches the 1,000th unit. Pledger says Northrop Grumman already has done a dozen at $1.3 million per.


Greek Tragedy

To prepare for the worst, he advocates a compromise to the all-or-nothing approach, "a prudent plan to put some capability out there." The idea: Modify the fleet to be able to accept the pods and concomitantly put some systems on the shelf. That way the industry is ready with a response. That might help mitigate the societal cost of a shootdown, a cost he pegs at "$2 billion per day . . . just if you have to restrict aircraft." It also would address RAND Corp.'s assessment that it's "not cost-effective" to spend some $11 billion to install counter-MANPADS on 6,800 commercial aircraft, a figure that doesn't include as much as $2.1 billion in annual operating costs.

But as it is, as the industry battles every day just to meet eviscerated schedules, "everything is on hold," says Reshef. "The airlines are insisting they are not going to pay the extra cost for installation. They're waiting for the authorities to pay. This is like a Greek tragedy. Everybody is waiting."


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