Proposals to equip civilian planes with military antimissile

[SN30952]

Most military planes can evade missiles because they can maneuver like high-performance sports cars.
In contrast, a commercial jet "is like the Greyhound bus of the sky.
Proposals to equip civilian planes with military technologies
With two recent attacks on big airplanes leaving Baghdad International Airport, experts on civilian aviation are debating how civilian airliners outside the battle zones could be protected from shoulder-fired missiles.
A few days before the C-17* was hit, a civilian wide-body jet was hit by a missile. On Nov. 22, a DHL cargo plane was hit on departure, a vulnerable time because the engines are working near maximum thrust, and emitting an easy-to-spot heat trail. It did not have an antimissile system.
The DHL plane was an Airbus A-300, a type in common use for carrying passengers. It, too, successfully returned to the airport, although aviation experts said it had a narrow escape.
In response to the missile threat, in September the Department of Homeland Security asked contractors for proposals to equip civilian planes with military antimissile technologies. Twenty-four responded, and the department invited five of them to present their technologies. The whole program would take 18 to 24 months.
The Avisys Corporation, of Austin, Tex., which says it has installed antimissile technology on aircraft that carry foreign heads of state, and Arinc, of Annapolis, Md., which specializes in various kinds of aviation-related electronics, have proposed a system that will use two kinds of sensors, to cut down on the false-alarm rate. One is a system that looks for light in the ultraviolet spectrum that is emitted by a missile's plume. The other is doppler radar that calculates the speed of an incoming missile, as well as its direction. The idea is to eliminate false alarms, according to the designers.
The system releases flares that burn on contact with air. But the flares burn at a relatively low temperature, so they are nearly invisible from the ground, so opponents with missiles would not know they were in use, said Ronald A. Gates, president of Avisys. Proponents say the system would sell for about $500,000 per airplane and would be easy to maintain, because not much can go wrong with the flares.
Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors, of Akron, Ohio, is one of three groups of companies to propose a system that uses an onboard laser. Cary Dell, a spokesman for the company, said that with a laser, "it's always available and there's nothing to replenish." If a plane relies on expendable flares, Mr. Dell said, "there's a limit to the load of expendables you can put into a system."
Lockheed Martin's system was developed over the last two years at the Air Force's White Sands test range in New Mexico, and is not yet on any planes, Mr. Dell said. It would meet the government's goals for price and weight of $1 million per plane and no more than 1,000 pounds, he said.
But the airlines remain unenthusiastic. "There have been no tests to show that this technology can be transferred from military jets to commercial airliners
Of the five, two or three are expected to get contracts early next month for $2 million each, to work on their proposals for six months.

*It was the first combat-related damage to a C-17. The C-17, built by Boeing, is one of the younger planes in the Air Force inventory. Presumably it was equipped with a system that detects missiles and then either drops decoy flares or deploys a laser to blind incoming missiles, the two technologies in broad use. An Air Force spokesman said that for "operational reasons," he would not say what equipment the C-17 carried.