I’m saying, if you’re worried about people discussing counterterrorism measures in public, perhaps you should start with the big boys first.
partly_warmer - “British snobbism” - WTF!?!? Could that perhaps be a xenophobic anti-British response to an Australian? Or did you think Sydney is in Britain?
Dude, you’re cracking up. Go to bed.
Thanks jjimm. I couldn’t decide between a response like yours, or just saying “I give up”.
Note to the mods: Please do not close this thread, as I am finding the debate to be pretty interesting. If you want to move it to another forum feel free.
jjimm, I’m American. We spell howe the heck we choose. The folks in Oz are FAR more interested getting their punctuation straight according to Standard Received Pronunciation than educated Americans are.
What I noted in Desmostylus’s rhetoric (cutsie pseudo-educated Greek name is extra) was the notion that little of what I actually said was important, because I made punctuation errors. Add a nice twist, that of course he didn’t actually meantion what these horrible, shameful errors were, but merely alluded to them. From my former UK life, that’s a typical snob tactic. Unfortunately, I outsnob him.
Bed would be good, but I’m not quite sure. Maybe some nerf-herder will show his true foam again.
I can see that I’m seriously outclassed here. I’m heading back to my home planet.
Cheat, cheat, cheat.
For UncleBill, let’s do the math.
Let’s say his exclusion zone is 20 miles in each direction and we secure only the 100 largest airports in the US.
That area would be the states of New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Well not quite, we’d still have room for New Jersey.
I just noticed – each exclusion zone would slightly exceed the size of Rhode Island.
This is funny, ya gotta admit!
partly, you called him British, not Australian. I was picking you up on that. Furthermore, the point that Desmostylus made was a throwaway remark about formatting, not punctuation. We were talking about conterterrorism. You hijacked the thread by telling us we shouldn’t talk about counterterrorism, and when picked up on it started throwing out paranoia, then persecution complexes and now misdirected insults, and seem to have flown off the handle into incomprehensibility.
Anyway, what sort of plane-based anti-missile measures do the military use? Is there a means of adapting these for civilian use? I’m guessing that the cost would be extortionate.
Stinkpalm, why would they close this thread? Seems like a clean debate.
aahala, I was avoiding the details of the “exclusion zone” idea for precisely the reasons I stated at the beginning. But you are right, the idea of securing an area 20 miles around even international airports is ridiculous.
The details are irrelevant. As the government has been saying, the next attack won’t look like the last one, anyhow. It won’t be by plane, it won’t be against a specific building. Speculating what it will be, as I’ve been arguing, is potentially aiding the terrorists.
I rarely use smileys and one may have been appropriate there. aahala asked for clarification on the “20 miles”, whether it was radius or diameter. It is radius, by the way. I took the phonetic sound of the username, noted to self it contained the sound for “Allah”, and in keeping with your previous posts warning that we should not divulge information on a public messageboard which may be picked up by terrorists, then used that argument to not reply. Feeble humor.
But to aahala’s last: That is why broomstick said
There is a difference between possible and practical.
jjimm, there are flares, which can be ignored, and there are IR prisms which rotate the energy and project IR “spots” at various points on the aircraft, meant to confuse the seeker head. These too, can be ignored by advanced missiles, but would be more effective on the SA-7b and that generation or missile, which is more prevalent.
Partly Wamer, perhaps you could supply a list of topics that are acceptable to talk about on this board.
After all, there are many, many ways that terrorists could use the knowledge presented here in evil ways.
Any questions on food should really be avoided. Questions regarding anything with computers should be verboten. Geez, this is just a quick list and I’m getting the sense that there’s a lot of discussion on this board that you might want to silence.
Maybe we should shut down the board to be safe.
But wait! I just had a thought. There are other places on the Internet where people are having, gasp, discussions on issues that concern them. And many of these discussion contain facts. These facts, when read by terrorists could become part of an extensive terror plan.
We better just shut down the whole Internet.
Oh no. I just had another thought. If there was no Internet people may turn to books.
This is all too frightening. I need to know that you have a plan in place in order to prevent this from happening.
O.K. In order to not put this in the pit, partly wamer, do you honestly believe that limiting discussion on this and related topics is going to accomplish anything? I don’t recall any discussions here on smashing planes into buildings or strapping bombs to war widows and raiding an opera house with the intention of killing hundreds of people. These terrorists have a nearly unlimited source of information available to them. Limiting our discussions here will do nothing to prevent terrorist acts. In fact, I think that limiting our discussions here, may in some small way help them.
Our job here is to eliminate ignorance. Putting this knowledge in the hands of people who want to fight terrorism is a good thing. It should be encouraged.
He said, bubbie, “punctuation”, originally. Changing the word to “formatting” affects, evocatively enough, very little. He mentioned nothing at all about what the formatting problems were, and treated them as though they were somehow central to the argument itself. (I.e., “I won’t listen to you if you don’t phrase it in a properly educated way.”) We were not taught this kind of disingenuous argumentation in American schools. My understanding, from my sister and my father, educated in British schools, is that it’s quite common in that school system. A system which the Ozzies follow fairly closely. Hence my comment, which I doubt was lost on him.
Addressing your last, somewhat frantic para, discussion of what preventative anti-missile measures are practical is clearly something the terrorists would like to know about. Why are you asking?
Here:
There’s a civilian program in Israel:
theglobeandmail
Several of yesterday’s stories claimed that the missiles were rocket propelled grenades. As these lack a targeting system, they’d be unaffected by flares or chaff. Today, the story goes that old Soviet-made antiaircraft missiles were used in the attack. They’d have a better chance of hitting than RPG’s, but also a better chance of being fooled by flares.
Because it was pertinent to the OP. You’re either very paranoid, or you’re taking the piss.
I don’t think the problem is the countermeasures as such. A flare ejector shouldn’t be all too expensive (speaking through the the brown rimmed megaphone.) I think a much larger problem is determining when to deploy the countermeasures.
As far as I know, commercial aircraft aren’t equipped with radar in the conventional sense. My understanding is that they have a display ofthe current positions of other planes that is transponder based. The ground control radar is similar, although they do have conventional radar as well.
Given this, you’re going to have to install a conventional radar unit in every commercial airliner. It has to be run through the whole certification process before it can be installed in a plane. That goes for the flare ejector as well. The radar has to be capable of tracking a small object in flight and automatically determining if it is a threat and then ejecting a flare. Possible, but what happens if it misfires? Think of flares falling in residential areas, or floating down and getting sucked into the intakes of the next jet. (Shudder)
You might be able to use an IR detector pointed behind the plane and set it to dump flares if it “sees” a hot source coming in from behind. It would need some intelligence so as not to be retriggered by its own flares. There is also the danger of having other planes dumping flares when one starts. A malfunction could get you a rain of flares from multiple aircraft. There is also a possibility of false triggering. What would happen if the IR sensor “saw” a welding torch on the ground?
Assuming you handle that, you’ve got to train maintenance crews to keep the equipment in running shape. You’ve got to have a whole logistics train for the supply and disposal of the damned flares. You’ve got to send pilots through an extra course so that they learn to arm and disarm the flare ejectors on take off and after landing.
We’re talking about some serious investments here. More importantly, though, we are talking about time. Time to design the equipment and get it certified. Time to produce it and get it installed. Time to train personnel. Time to build the logistics train to support it all. Too much time. The missiles are already out there.
I think that there is too much talk of range for the missiles. The free flight range is not so much the determiner of your “safety zone” diameter as the relative speeds and accelerations of the missile and the plane. At the start, the plane has a high speed and is accelerating. The missile starts at zero speed and accelerates. The question becomes: How large must the seperation at the start be before the missile is incapable of catching the plane before running out of fuel? I don’t have numbers handy to do the math, but it should be calculable - and considerably less than the maximum range of the missile.
I don’t think the problem is the countermeasures as such. A flare ejector shouldn’t be all too expensive (speaking through the the brown rimmed megaphone.) I think a much larger problem is determining when to deploy the countermeasures.
As far as I know, commercial aircraft aren’t equipped with radar in the conventional sense. My understanding is that they have a display ofthe current positions of other planes that is transponder based. The ground control radar is similar, although they do have conventional radar as well.
Given this, you’re going to have to install a conventional radar unit in every commercial airliner. It has to be run through the whole certification process before it can be installed in a plane. That goes for the flare ejector as well. The radar has to be capable of tracking a small object in flight and automatically determining if it is a threat and then ejecting a flare. Possible, but what happens if it misfires? Think of flares falling in residential areas, or floating down and getting sucked into the intakes of the next jet. (Shudder)
You might be able to use an IR detector pointed behind the plane and set it to dump flares if it “sees” a hot source coming in from behind. It would need some intelligence so as not to be retriggered by its own flares. There is also the danger of having other planes dumping flares when one starts. A malfunction could get you a rain of flares from multiple aircraft. There is also a possibility of false triggering. What would happen if the IR sensor “saw” a welding torch on the ground?
Assuming you handle that, you’ve got to train maintenance crews to keep the equipment in running shape. You’ve got to have a whole logistics train for the supply and disposal of the damned flares. You’ve got to send pilots through an extra course so that they learn to arm and disarm the flare ejectors on take off and after landing.
We’re talking about some serious investments here. More importantly, though, we are talking about time. Time to design the equipment and get it certified. Time to produce it and get it installed. Time to train personnel. Time to build the logistics train to support it all. Too much time. The missiles are already out there.
I think that there is too much talk of range for the missiles. The free flight range is not so much the determiner of your “safety zone” diameter as the relative speeds and accelerations of the missile and the plane. At the start, the plane has a high speed and is accelerating. The missile starts at zero speed and accelerates. The question becomes: How large must the seperation at the start be before the missile is incapable of catching the plane before running out of fuel? I don’t have numbers handy to do the math, but it should be calculable - and considerably less than the maximum range of the missile.
That’s ‘snobbishness’ old bean, what. Darned colonials, the chaps have no sense of grammar.
Lord Archer, no doubt.
BfT.
Mont furd, a rear-mounted continuous wave doppler radar would alert the pilot to an object closing at a high rate of speed from the rear. Problems I see immediately are the low radar cross section of an approaching shoulder-fired missile and the reaction time. Missiles fly very fast (supersonic) and close that small gap really fast.
IR Sensors do work better, and discriminate quite well between a mach plus missile and a welder’s torch or other flares. The can be place in automatic mode to remove the pilot reaction lag time.