But deployment decision is problematic
The time is fast approaching when the Bush administration and Congress must decide whether missile defenses for airliners are worth the money.
In the next few weeks, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems will be installing and flying prototype missile defense systems to test out their compatibilities with airliners and with airline operations. Both companies use laser technology to confuse the heat-seeking sensors in missiles, causing the missiles to miss their target. Northrop Grumman will outfit two out-of-service planes and BAE will equip one. The goal is to obtain supplemental type certification (STC) by October, thereby permitting more widespread application of the technology.
This flight test program is Phase II of a three-phase Department of Homeland Security (DHS) project to assess the viability of missile defenses for commercial airliners. Phase III will commence early in fiscal year 2006, featuring for Northrop Grumman 13 aircraft (a mix of MD-10s and MD-11s flown by Federal Express) to demonstrate reliability of the system. Reliability is here defined as mean time between failure, and the DHS goal is 3,000 hours, roughly the equivalent of a year’s flying.
Both the Northrop Grumman and the BAE Systems missile defenses are installed on military aircraft. The goal of the DHS effort is to see if the technology can be readily adapted for use on commercial airliners.
The Northrop Grumman system is typical, consisting of an interface on the skin of the aircraft for electrical and structural hookup. The defensive sensors and lasers are in a pod that mounts at the interface. About 500 have been installed on military aircraft like the C-130 and C-17 cargo planes.
The interface costs about $100,000, and the pod costs about $1 million. One concept envisions more aircraft equipped with the interfaces, facilitating installation within a couple hours of pods should the flight be to a high-threat area.
The system uses aircraft power, drawing at maximum about 1,800 watts. “That’s equivalent to about a hairdryer,” said James Shilling, a Northrop Grumman official.
According to Shilling, the concept of operation is straightforward. The pilots turn on the system in the morning, before the first flight. If the system detects a missile launch at the aircraft, it provides a warning to the pilots and to air traffic control. However, the pilots do not have to do anything, as the system is autonomous – it will automatically engage the target. The laser is not a kill laser, Shilling said, but a decoy laser. The missile is basically diverted from its target.
Maintenance of the system is expected to be minimal. This is one of the major concerns of airlines, that the maintenance will involve special techniques and will require security clearances for the maintainers. Shilling said the sensors must be kept clean and a water-absorbing dessicant must be replaced every few months. “No special tooling is needed,” he said.
The system would have a 10-day MMEL master minimum equipment list (MMEL), although the details have yet to be worked out. Under this concept, if the system required repair, 10 days would be allowed before doing do so, thereby permitting the airline to get the plane to a major repair base. Shilling said that basically the airline would remove the faulty pod and replace it with another. The failed pod would be shipped to Northrop Grumman for repair.
Shilling pointed to a survey showing that people feel safer with the missile defensive system on the airliner. This survey of 1,000 registered voters was conducted in March by The Winston Group, a public relations firm. It was paid for by Northrop Grumman. The survey shows that 80 percent of people would be willing to pay $10 more per ticket to fly on an airliner with missile defenses installed.
However, the RAND Corp. takes a more nuanced view. It quotes a $15 billion loss to the industry from a successful missile attack on an airliner. But it also pegs the cost of equipping America’s 6,800 jetliners with missile defenses at some $11 billion, and when operations and support costs are factored in, the 10-year cost could approach $25 billion. These operating costs include the added fuel due to additional weight and drag of the pod; that cost is estimated at $45,000 per aircraft per year. Most, if not all, of the installation and support costs would be borne by the U.S. government, according to sources.
Given the huge cost and technical uncertainties, RAND recommended postponing a decision to install defenses on airliners. The Air Transport Association, the trade group representing most major carriers, supports this view:
“The RAND report underscores our belief that missile defense systems being proposed today for commercial aviation consist of unproven technologies that not only would cost tens of billions of dollars to deploy, but could expose the airline industry to other serious threats.
“We strongly concur with the study’s finding that a systematic approach is needed, to assess the threats facing commercial aviation, and to determine how best to allocate the limited resources available for homeland security.”
This view flies in the face of numerous proposals in Congress to equip all jet-powered airliners, including the new Airbus A380, with defensive avionics (see ASW, April 18, June 13, June 20). Some within the industry instead propose equipping the Civil Reserve Aircraft Fleet (CRAF), which consists of airliners that can be pressed into service supporting the military. Since these aircraft often fly to the same location as missile defense-equipped military transports, it may make sense to similarly equip them. It should be noted that only 1,100 airliners would be equipped by the end of FY 2007, according to RAND, which is enough to outfit the CRAF.
Support for RAND’s go-slow approach on missile defenses comes from the so-called Large Aircraft Survivability Initiative (LASI), which is spearheaded by the U.S. Air Force with support from the Federal Aviation Administration, the DHS and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). LASI was formed after missile attacks on airliners in Kenya in late 2002 and in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
The goal under LASI is to assess the survivability of large aircraft and to assess what survivability measures are most appropriate, including missile defenses. LASI, which just got started this year, will be looking at the propensity of fuel tanks to explode when penetrated, the benefits of fuel tank inerting, the impact of .50 caliber rounds on aircraft, and so forth. In other words, LASI intends to increase the base of knowledge of the effects of missile, gunfire, and explosives on aircraft, and to determine how survivability may be best enhanced. This could be achieved through separation of vital systems, fuel tank inerting, fire suppression, or other measures. In other words, missile defenses may or may not be the most cost effective way to go. That remains to be determined by LASI.
Two Concerns of Many Raised By RAND On Missile Defenses
Costs:
“Once all systems are installed, annual O&S [Operations & Support] costs would amount to a little over $300,000 per airplane, or $2.1 billion for a 6,800-plane fleet.
“Two O&S cost-related issues could add to the overall uncertainty and potential cost growth of the LCC [life cycle cost] estimates. First, how would passenger flight safety concerns related to a faulty [defensive laser] system affect the airline industry’s record for on-time departures, if the countermeasure system were considered flight-critical hardware? What will be the criteria by which airline mechanics and airport schedulers decide it is prudent to delay scheduled departure? Decisions for this system are more comparable to a breach or malfunction in the security doors of the pilot’s cockpit as opposed to detecting an oil leak coming from one of the engines.
“Second, our LCC estimates are based on designing and producing robust, highly reliable systems that will allow for on-equipment airport turnaround times fast enough to fit within most of today’s flight schedules. MTBFs [mean time between failure] that exceed our assumed values or failure of the built-in test system to allow rapid enough diagnostics could lead to
- procuring higher quantities of spares…
- late departures or flight cancellations.
“Our uncertainty allowance may cover the first of these consequences, but it was not intended to encompass the second. The costs of late departures could be substantial. For example, suppose all…system failures take more than 30 minutes to fix for short-haul flights, and 75 percent of them take more than four hours for long-haul flights. If the net revenue loss for each hour of delayed departure is $10,000, the annual O&S cost would increase by 18 percent, from $2.1 billion to $2.5 billion. To avoid such losses, airlines may choose to increase the use of available aircraft at airports or activate reserve aircraft to fill in, but these options have their own costs.”
Operational:
“Even though the commercial [laser] system will be designed to operate autonomously and not require pilot intervention, it will need to include communications links for transmitting data directly to law enforcement, transportation security, aviation safety, and homeland-security authorities located at ground command and control (C2) centers. In other words, it needs to be able to integrate into an overall aviation safety and security system.
“The purpose of this link into the system is threefold. First, the link would serve to pass system reliability information on to aviation security officials. This would inform flight procedures if countermeasure systems break down prior to takeoff or during flight. Second, the link should inform aviation safety officials when [threat missiles] are being detected so as to notify nearby aviation traffic of possible danger.
“Third, the link should inform law enforcement authorities by indicating the nature of the attack and the estimated location(s) of attackers.
“It should be noted that the latter two could include false alarms, so procedures need to properly balance security, safety, and economic issues.”
Source: http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2005/RAND_OP106.pdf