Posted on 05/10/2014 6:56:14 PM PDT by Seizethecarp
“You’ve got drones!”
Why not install lasers on both sides of the runways? They could be locked-out for acceptable transponder codes, but could vaporize anything else in the area, including birds and the drones, before the aircraft enters the zone.
They didn’t see this happening?
As soon as I heard of all these drones that were supposed to be in the sky that scenario came to mind.
Like the idiotic idea Amazon had of delivering packages same day via drones. Come on !!
Just wait until a passenger jet collides with a drone. The s@@t is going to hit the turbo-fan.
“Why not install lasers on both sides of the runways?”
Check this out (from my collection of web links):
US military’s RAY-GUN truck BLASTS DRONES, mortars OUT OF THE SKY
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/13/us_military_laser_truck_destroys_mortars_drones/
In month-long tests at the White Sands missile range in new Mexico, the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HELMD) blew up 90 mortar rounds and several aerial drones using a 10kW-class laser mounted on an armored vehicle.
“We had considerable success,” Terry Bauer, Army program manager for HELMD told the Christian Science Monitor.
The HELMD system uses radar (or as the military calls it “Enhanced Multi Mode Radar”) to track targets and focus the laser on them. Once locked, the laser raises the temperature of mortar shells to the point where the explosives they contain combust.
“It falls as a single piece of metal with a little bit of shrapnel. It basically falls where it was going to fall, but it doesnt explode when it hits the ground,” Bauer said. We turn it into a rock, basically.
Boeing, which developed the system for the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command, said the technology is now ready for an upgrade so that it can carry a 50kW laser, with a more powerful 100kW unit also in the pipeline.
Eventually the military want to use the system to shoot down incoming cruise missiles, rockets and artillery shells, although it’ll need some improvements before then. Mortar shells are relatively slow moving and have a trajectory that’s easy to predict, but a cruise missile flying a variable course will be a much tougher target to destroy.
Soldiers on deployment in America’s many ongoing wars probably wont get to see the system in action before they are retired. The HELMD system probably wont be ready for deployment until 2022 at the earliest.
“Just wait until a passenger jet collides with a drone. The s@@t is going to hit the turbo-fan.”
Correct.
The 9/11 attack revealed a single point of failure that the terrorists exploited (no bullet-proof lock on cabin door) and the US and world air traffic ground to a halt until the crash correction of that defect.
IMO, using a GPS-guided drone to target the turbofan of a large airframe in the two-dimensional space of a runway rather than the three-dimensional space in the air is much more likely to be successful, despite recent close calls reported in the news.
If just ONE 737 was caused to crash catestrophically on take-off anywhere in the world in the same manner as Yukla-27 in the “runway kill zone” (RKZ) that I have identified and it was realized that this type of attack could be replicated at any time anywhere in the world...the world air passenger and freight traffic would STOP for who knows how long while authorities scrambled to develop on-the-fly anti-drone airport counter-measures.
See:
Bookmark
US militarys RAY-GUN...
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Thanks for an interesting article.
Pretty shocking how clunky it is and how impractical for widespread protection of civilian aviation any time soon...
Of course, there is stuff they aren’t showing...
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