Aircraft

By Aimée Turner in Vienna

ALPA says Manpads protection may be costly and unsafe

The US Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) is set to oppose the installation of countermeasures systems on board civil aircraft as a means of protection from shoulder-launched missiles.

In a paper yet to be released by ALPA, which represents 61,000 pilots flying for 39 US and Canadian airlines, the union investigates the threat posed by man-portable air defence systems (Manpads) and weighs up the alternatives: countermeasures on aircraft as opposed to ground-based anti-missile systems around airports and much simpler ground-based surveillance systems such as CCTV. Its conclusion is that while countermeasures technology is too costly for airlines, it is also a threat to onboard systems integrity and may be obsolete at inception.

“While most first-generation Manpads were produced in the 1960s and early 1970s and so the failure rate in firing is high, current countermeasures systems can only handle heat-seeking missiles. They do not address rocket-propelled grenades, small arms or radar-guided missile systems. Infra-red jamming systems also require extra power-generation on board and create a potential danger to the aircraft’s systems,” says Capt Nico Voorbach, who heads the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations (IFALPA) security committee. The ALPA paper is due to be discussed in October by IFALPA’s security committee. “The biggest problem is that most of the cost is placed on the airline when it is really a ground-based problem. With the development of ground-based anti-missile and detection systems, the burden stays with the government – where it should be,” adds Voorbach.

The issue of countermeasures systems for civil airliners was also debated at last week’s Aeronautic Days event in Vienna, Austria. Gilles Fournier of EADS Corporate Research reported on the progress of the €2 million ($2.5 million) European Union-funded Protection of airliners against Manpads (PALMA) study into countermeasures technologies and their potential use by European airlines. Concerns included false alarms, safety aspects of decoys and the influence of aero-optic effects on directional infrared countermeasures (DIRCM) systems, he said.

Capt Heinz Fruhwirth, European Cockpit Association technical director, told delegates that aircraft survivability would be a much better area for research investment. “It is improbable that a Manpads attack would bring a large passenger aircraft down as the explosive power is limited. If you look what happened in the DHL attack in Iraq, all normal flight control stopped working and the aircraft was landed by the pilots using differential power. Pilots don’t normally receive any training in that,” he said.