Are more missile attacks on airliners imminent? If so, what do we do?

I am just kidding about Pussy Galore, the actress was very beautiful in the picture, and Bond did make her join the good guys in the end of the film.

I am not terribly interested in what the secret idea was either. Broomstick and HappyHeathen have the right idea to keep it to themselves. But, should the NSA or another government funded alphabet organization figure it out, they could probably take steps to prevent it from occuring. If it is so simple, many airports and owners ought to have thought of it before now, and they may have done something about it.

Problem is, it’s soooo simple you can’t ever entirely elimate the possibility. Which is why anti-missile defenses have to be mounted on the airplanes to be protected, not on the ground.

It’s like… well, when you’re walking down a really crowded sidewalk, there is always the possibility that someone near you will just randomly punch you in the face. It almost never happens, because the vast majority of people in this world have zero motivation to committ such a random act of violence, but it could. The only way to truly 100% eliminate getting punched in the face on the sidewalk is to either eliminate sidewalks entirely, forbid everyone from walking on them, or only allow one person at a time on a sidewalk. But then you’d still have random punch possibilities from walking on footpaths, roads, and up and down the hallways of buildings.

If a sudden epidemic of face-punching occurred, though, what would you do? Well, some folks would avoid public places. Lots of folks would be more distance between them and the other guy. There might be a new fashion in padded face-masks. But you will never eliminate the possibility of a random face-punch so long as people are permitted within arm’s length of each other. Even if we reduced occassions where that was permitted, there are all sorts of circumstances where you HAVE to get close to your neighbor.

And that’s what we’re facing now. You can NEVER eliminate all risk of terrorist attack. All you can do is reduce the risk, make yourself a harder target than the next guy, and try to hunt down the human deviants who perpetrate such crimes.

Which gets back to the Unspoken Tactic. The ONLY way to completely defend against it is to eliminate ALL air travel. ALL of it. And air travel is just too darned useful in this world. Second choice is to outfit the “best target” airplanes (those carrying significant numbers of people, or highly sensitive cargo) with missle defense systems. That we can do - but it will cost money.

Perhaps I’m dense, but I’m not sure how your post relates to the differences between air and ground based defenses.

I concur with Broomstick, to a certain extent.

I already know how I could kill my next door neighbour, or a random person on the street, and I have the means at hand to do those things.

There is simply nothing that my neighbour or hypothetical random person can do to protect themselves from me.

In reality, the neighbour and hypothetical random person have no cause to fear me, personally, because even though I have the knowledge, I don’t have any motivation.

I fully support measures that will make it more more difficult for further terrorist actions to occur, but really, I think it’s going to take some serious ass-kicking somewhere to remove terrorist motivation.

Whoa! Was G.Nome reincarnated as partly_warmer ?

The post has more to do with the idea that we can protect ourselves through purely defensive measures.

We can’t. The deviants in this case are agressively targeting and attacking people, and not just a small segment of people but the entire “West”, the “Americans and their allies”, and the “Zionists”.

This is a rare case where the only defense is an offense. That doesn’t mean we go over and just bomb the crap out of the Middle East (however tempting that may be to some people), it means WE go after the perpetrators agressively ourselves. That includes policework to track the guilty down, some spying, intelligence gathering, and yes, the occassional killing of people. I’m sorry, all you peace-lovers who don’t want to study war no more, but we’re going to have kick some butt from time to time. Passive resistance does not work against people who have the goal of your complete, total, and utter destruction.

But to get back to ground vs. air defenses… the reason the Unspoken Tactic is NOT obvious is because most people are not pilots, are not used to thinking in terms of flight and its capabilities, and just plain too accustomed to existing solely on the ground.

Here’s another example - prior to 9/11, the rules were to cooperate with hijackers, because until that point cooperation almost always resulted in more people alive and unhurt and the end of the day that resistance and confrontation. Why? Because back in the Good Old Days ™ hijackers wanted things like a trip to Cuba, or to defect from somewhere, or lots of ransom money, or something like that. At 9/11, there was a paradigm shift (a way overused phrase, but in this case the most concise term). The hijackers changed the rules. They didn’t want anything BUT the airplane, and a lot of people dead. Now, no one in their right mind will cooperate with ANY hijacker ANYWHERE. This didn’t require a change in technology, or tactics, or anything but a change in a way of thinking. Yes, the possibility of crashing an airplane into a building had occured to people before - in fact, when the WTC was designed, it was considered what would happen if a 707 hit the buildings - but in was mostly in the context of an accident, not a “delibrate”. (Among other things - a WWII bomber did accidently crash into the Empire State Building in the 40’s, so the info really was all there) Everything needed to pull off a 9/11 stunt has existed in the world since… oh… when did the British Comet jetliner go into service? Sometime in the 1950’s? The technology has existed for 50 years, maybe more. But now that the idea is out of the bag, now that it is conceivable and known and done, the danger will always remain. You will never see another passenger jet built without some protection for the cockpit crew designed in from the get-go.

Right now, attacking jets exists in a particular paradigm. The Unspoken Tactic comes out of a slightly different way of thinking about the problem. As I said, the technology to accomplish it has been around a LONG time… but not the way of thinking required to perform it. Right now, such thinking is limited to only a few, and most of us probably had no reason to think such thoughts until an Isreali charter jet was fired upon by SA-7 missiles in Kenya. And, the vast majority of those few have zero motivation to perform such acts, but significant motive to avoid them, prevent them, and just not reveal our thinking on the matter. When the paradigm shift occurs, the playing field will change and it will be obvious to all what the danger is… but until then, why push for the change?

Quoting from Broomstick (cause I dont know how to make the quotes work yet)

“Which gets back to the Unspoken Tactic. The ONLY way to completely defend against it is to eliminate ALL air travel. ALL of it. And air travel is just too darned useful in this world. Second choice is to outfit the “best target” airplanes (those carrying significant numbers of people, or highly sensitive cargo) with missle defense systems. That we can do - but it will cost money.”

But wasn’t this potential solution to the problem brought up earlier?

To add,

Even this would not be enough, because without the intelligence gathering, and tactical response phases, an enemy could simply overwhelm any missile defense system that we design into an aircraft.

The whole package has to be purchased in order to make it work.

Hmm… yes, potentially the missle defense system could be overwhelmed… but will it? How likely? The easiest way to put the Unspoken Tactic into effect severely limits the number of missles per team. If you want more missiles, the UT is harder to pull off. It’s a LOT easier to move/smuggle 1 or 2 SAM’s than a dozen or score or a hundred of them. Sure, you could break into small teams, but the more people involved the more likelihood of discovery. The discovery of just one group will trigger an alert and the Good Guys will be beating the bushes and looking under rocks for more Bad Guys.

Not to mention any attack on an airliner will generate a response. They only need to ward off/escape attack for 15-20 minutes. And while the jets can’t outrun the missiles, they CAN outrun the guys launching them, which will severely limit the effectiveness of the attack You might, potentially, have “Flight 93” tactics with someone in a small plane, or in a cargo plane with only crew aboard, interposing themselves between the terrorists and the target plane full of people.

So… hit and run away to try again another day, or keep firing until you’re caught, then blow yourselves up? How many SAM’s to overwhelm a Nemisis system? So many variables, so many scenarios…

So put the I/R jammers onboard all passenger transports with >200 seats.

As the bad guy, I:

  1. (stuff we won’t mention involving threat assessment algorithms)

  2. Alter the missle to use I/R only for target aquisition, other means for tracking

  3. Get the missle so close it doesn’t need to “see” all that well

  4. Use “dumb and blind” technology.

Military “superiority” doesn’t last very long - as soon as a technology is deployed, it is obsolete.

p.s. on a couple of occasions, I have had unfettered access to unsecured biz jets (Citation and Gulfstream) in open hangars within class bravo airspace.

good thing I’m a nice guy, huh?

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Huh? Like what?

If you don’t use the IR seeker for tracking, then why have it there at all? “Acquisition”? Your eyes and ears can spot a plane just as easily.

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If you’re that close, you might as well chuck grenades at it.

:slight_smile:

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What’s that?

Er, it’s not obsolete. It’s just that countermeasures are developed, and then so are counter-countermeasures, etc.

Radar, optical, ask the military…I/R is, however, good for picking out an engine.

Exactly.

Remember the recoiless rifle example?

If my “ordinary, everyday” bullet can penetrate your armor, your armor is obsolete.

p.s. - airliners do not have bullet-proof fuel tanks, and tracers are readily available…

There’s no point in using IR if you’re going to use optical tracking. If the jet is close enough to shoot, it’s going to be close enough to see, and you don’t need an IR locator. Just use the optics.

Ok, well if we are going to talk technology for rendering shoulder-fired missles ineffective weapons for shooting down passenger planes,

  1. Install flares and chaff on the planes, this can be done to almost any aircraft, and very inexpensively. Individiualy owned aircraft can do this.

  2. Install IR and Radar Jamming equipment in commercial passenger planes. This can be done easily by a company like Eastern Airlines (or another)

  3. Install a 7.62mm rotary cannon in the tail of commercial planes, so should a missle come within a mile of the aircraft, the missle would be shot. (I don’t know how this would “fly” {no pun intended) with civil authorities over populated areas like Houston, but it is needed to secure the aircraft so…)

  4. We armor the plane against some kind of light round, like 7.62mm or something like it, and install self-sealing fuel tanks, packed with flame retardents.

Now, if we do all these things to passenger airlines, then they become very nearly invulnerable to many kinds of missle attacks. And we are no longer flying in passenger airplanes, but in fact we are flying in military transport aircraft.

While it still will not protect against all missle attacks, it will make it so terribly difficult to execute an attack against a commercial jet that the terrorist will have to go bomb something else.

Sorry, but the Unmentioned Tactic (at least my varient) would thwart all of those.

Care to try again?

I think I know what the secret tactic is, I have also thought of a dozen tactics that I will not mention, for the same reason. Yet, without mentioning these, I cannot explain a defense against them.

It is a perplexing dogma…

The usual way of making the sky safe for transports involves emptying it of all other traffic, and sterilizing the ground around airports. Essentially declaring the airspace to be one big free-fire zone.

As mentioned, that is not feasible in this day and age - we rely on air transport for just about everything - including snail mail.