Under pressure from Congress to deploy anti-missile systems rapidly on commercial
airliners, the Department of Homeland Security is expected to award multiple
contracts by year’s end.
So far, however, it is uncertain whether any of the available technologies
to defeat man-portable air defenses (manpads) can be installed on commercial
aircraft without burdening the airlines with billions of dollars in future maintenance
and operations costs. The procurement of defensive systems alone could cost
the U.S. government anywhere from $3 million to $8 million per aircraft, experts
estimate, although several companies claim to have cheaper solutions.
Under the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-manpads program,
two or more contractors—to be selected in late December—will receive
$2 million each to develop detailed proposals over the next six months, outlining
exactly how they would go about installing protective devices and how the systems
would be integrated into day-to-day airline operations.
“DHS is in a very sensitive position,” said an industry expert.
“They have a tremendous amount of pressure being put on them by Congress
to get this thing on contract before Christmas.” Congressmen want to prove
to the American public that they are addressing the problem.
The problem, in this case, is the widespread fear of shoulder-fired missiles,
which have threatened military aircraft for decades, but have not until recently
been viewed as a menace to commercial passenger jets. A shoulder-fired missile
was fired in November 2002 against a civilian Israeli jetliner, in Mombasa,
Kenya. DHS officials, nevertheless, concede that they do not have explicit intelligence
about manpads threats aimed at U.S. airliners.
The department has “no specific, credible information about planned manpads
attacks against U.S. commercial interests—but they remain a concern for
the foreseeable future,” according to an October 15 briefing that DHS
officials gave to potential contractors, in Washington, D.C.
Since 1978, 35 commercial aircraft (mostly propeller aircraft) have been targets
of non-terrorist attacks in war zones. The attack on the Israeli jetliner was
the first manpads launch against a commercial aircraft outside of a combat zone,
said the DHS briefing. Meanwhile, “the potential for terrorist attack
grows as we increase measures to counter onboard bombings and hijackings.”
Shortly after the Mombasa incident, an interagency task force—led by
Penrose C. Albright, DHS assistant secretary for plans, programs and budget—was
formed to examine available options to equip airliners with infrared countermeasures,
which have been used on military aircraft for decades, to deflect heat-seeking
missiles.
The Defense Department has a major advisory role in the task force, taking
advantage of the Pentagon’s expertise in this arena.
“We gave them a baseline against which to draw conclusions and make some
judgments about how to proceed, what kind of technologies are applicable to
commercial air,” said a Defense Department official who participated in
the task force, and asked to not be quoted by name. The Pentagon also advised
DHS on how to “engage industry,” the official said. “We provided
recommendations on how to structure solicitations and how to define requirements.”
The Pentagon plans to let DHS benefit from military investments in counter-manpads
systems, he added.
Once the DHS contractors complete the six-month study phase, two will be selected
for a subsequent 18-month “prototype development and qualification”
program, after which they will demonstrate and test-fly two prototype systems.
In this phase of the program, each contractor will receive $45 million. The
Federal Aviation Administration must approve any devices before they can be
installed on aircraft.
DHS wants the anti-missile systems to be easy to maintain and painless to operate,
causing “no delays to take-off and landing preparations,” the briefing
noted. They must be able to run for 3,000 hours without breakdowns, and should
not demand any special test equipment. They cannot interfere in any way with
surrounding flight operations, nor should they pose safety or environmental
hazards.
DHS said that the desired cost of a counter-manpads system is about $1 million
per aircraft, assuming a buy of at least 1,000. (U.S. airlines operate nearly
7,000 planes). The cost to operate the system should be less than $500 per take-off
and landing. But experts contend that these estimates are overly optimistic.
Although the counter-manpads program so far has not commanded the big dollars
usually associated with Pentagon procurement projects, companies expect it could
be worth billions, if the U.S. government decides to equip every airliner, and
foreign airlines decide to follow the U.S. lead.
A marketing war already is raging. Competitors include several defense industry
giants and smaller firms that believe they can challenge the heavyweights. The
counter-manpads technology offered to DHS essentially falls into two camps:
laser-based systems (known as laser directed infrared countermeasures) and more
traditional decoy-based systems, which expend flares to deflect incoming missiles.
Laser directional systems concentrate a beam of infrared energy on the missile
seeker and jam it. Both types of technologies—the directed laser beam
or the decoys—require some form of a missile-warning device.
DHS told contractors that the department is “neutral and will not advocate
any particular solution until proven operationally and cost-effectively viable.”
Laser systems generally are considered the most sophisticated of the available
technologies, but also the costliest, the least mature, and possibly too heavy
for many aircraft. Flares, on the other hand, are battle tested and widely employed
in military aircraft, but, as most pyrotechnics, are perceived as too hazardous
for use in non-combat environments.
One of the proposed laser systems is a modified version of the IR countermeasures
technology the Air Force is buying for the C-17 and C-130 transport aircraft.
The LAIRCM (large aircraft IR countermeasures) could be adapted for commercial
aircraft on time to meet the DHS schedule, for a price of $1 million per aircraft,
said Jack Pledger, director of business development at Northrop Grumman Defensive
Systems Division. The company already has delivered 58 systems to military customers,
he said.
A similar technology is being marketed by BAE Systems, which is developing
a laser IR countermeasures system for Army helicopters. The cost would be comparable
to LAIRCM or lower, said Burt Keirstead, program manager at BAE Systems. The
company is concerned about lowering the maintenance and operation costs, Keirstead
said. “There is a tradeoff between acquisition costs and life cycle costs,”
he said. “The more you spend upfront the more you save later.”
The Pentagon official who advises DHS said that laser systems certainly offer
the best performance, but that the cost could be much higher than $1 million
per aircraft. Defense Department studies project laser IR CM systems would range
from $3 million to $8 million. “Lasers are certainly the most sophisticated
solution and have the greatest growth potential to adapt to future generations
of threats,” the official said. “But there are substantial savings
in flare systems.”
One of the competitors offering a flare-based protection system is Avisys,
a small firm that recently won a $12 million contract to equip Jordan’s
head of state Airbus 340 wide-body jet with airborne infrared countermeasures.
Raytheon, teamed with Israel Aircraft Industries’ Elta division, also
is proposing a flare-based system dubbed SafeFlight. The missile warning system,
made by Elta, is a pulse Doppler radar. The IR countermeasure dispenser, supplied
by Raytheon, releases “invisible, environmentally safe material into the
atmosphere,” said a company spokesman.
Avisys claims that decoy-based systems have received an unfair bad rap, mostly
due to news photos published in papers and magazines, often showing military
aircraft spewing pellets of burning pyrotechnics.
“It’s a misrepresentation of the technology,” because modern
flares don’t “burn” that intensely, said James Carey, vice
president of Avisys. Airplanes that employ older flares tend to release lots
of them. But with modern flares, only four to six expendables are released and
they burn for two seconds. Older pyrotechnic decoys burn for five to six seconds.
The more advanced flares, he added, “don’t burn in the classic
sense. ... They are simply oxidizing very quickly once they leave the airplane,
raising the heat to draw the missile off. But they are not pyrotechnic”
like fireworks.
“New decoys generate heat, but the temperatures are the same as the aircraft
engines, so they can fly covert in the IR spectrum,” Carey said.
Even though Carey recognizes that lasers are the “desirable solution,”
he believes that the decoy-based systems offer a more attractive short-term
solution. “We know there are some implementation issues that we have to
solve during this program, such as the safety aspects of the dispensers and
decoys.”
The Avisys technology would cost about $700,000 per aircraft, including the
modifications needed in the airframes, said Carey.
Laser advocates speculate that the FAA never would approve flares or decoys
on U.S. airliners. But Carey noted that the FAA has granted waivers to foreign
aircraft equipped with flares.
Avisys is scheduled to deliver the Jordanian Airbus in January, equipped with
a system called WIPPS (wide-body integrated platform protection system). It
combines an ultraviolet missile warning system with a Doppler radar device—which
looks for objects approaching at speeds greater than .8 Mach, and a decoy dispenser.
The hardware weighs 250 pounds, including the expendables. Flares are dispensed
in the front and the back of the aircraft.
This technology is not as susceptible to false alarms as other systems, Carey
said, because it only responds to “hot” objects moving at very high
speeds.
Pledger, from Northrop Grumman, said that directional laser systems have lower
false alarm rates than flares. Nevertheless, “there is no system in the
world completely foolproof.” The company also is working to reduce the
weight of the LAIRCM system by taking out unneeded power supplies and cables,
he said.
Performance features such as false-alarm rates and weight are important factors,
said the Pentagon official. But the DHS also emphasizes reliability and life-cycle
costs, which means that the winning contractor likely will have to demonstrate
it can manufacture these systems in a way that minimizes failures of any components.
“There is concern at DHS about reliability, size and weight,” said
the defense official. “They don’t want to increase drag on the aircraft,
which would drive up fuel consumption.”
An industry source noted that, even if the U.S. government agreed to pay for
the hardware, it is not yet clear how much of a financial burden it would be
for the airlines to maintain the equipment. “This is where the hang-up
is,” said the industry expert. “The airlines are very concerned
about this.”
DHS officials so far have not discussed with the airlines whether they’ll
need special maintenance facilities in airports around the world, what support
costs they will incur and, notably, whether airplanes would automatically get
grounded when the system mal-
functions. Grounded airplanes would translate into big losses that airlines
could not afford, the expert said.
“All these issues have to be addressed within the 24-month program,”
he said. “Logistics and affordability are far and away the most important
things on the program.”