AAl Qaeda plot to blow up El Al, Israel Airlines, In Bangok, Thailand, Foiled.

[Darksheare]

Oh man.
Here, merely looking at a furtive acting arabian looking man would be enought to sue on grounds of profiling.
As we all know.
And then people wonder why the US is looked at oddly.

[Moose4]

Most of those shoulder-launched missiles are pretty short-range, they reach to maybe 10,000 feet above ground, if that high, so any attack is going to occur in the area close to an airport. I would think that they would attempt an attack on takeoff (like the Kenyan missile attack) since the engines will be at or near full throttle, so they are putting out more heat and giving a bigger heat signature for the missiles to home on. Also, the plane will be low and slow and still full of fuel.

I have to admit this, and it's a sick thought. I used to live outside DC fifteen years ago, and being the aircraft nut I am, I used to wander down to the Potomac and watch the planes shooting the runway 19 "river visual" approach into Washington National. More than once, as I watched a jetliner wobbling a few hundred feet over the Fourteenth Street Bridge before turning on final, I thought to myself, "My God, all it would take is one idiot with a missile or a machine gun or something, and you'd have a catastrophe on your hands."

(If you've never flown into Reagan Washington National, planes can't make a straight-in approach from the north because they'd have to overfly the White House, the Capitol, or the Mall. So they route them flying down the Potomac, cutting between the monuments on their left and the skyscrapers of Crystal City and the Pentagon on their right, before a last-minute sharp right turn to the runway. I've never flown on a plane making the approach, but believe me, watching it from the ground is a little scary.)

}:-)4

[XHogPilot]

Please look for private reply regarding your post. I have a bad feeling about this!

[El Gato]

They do their airlines RIGHT, instead of the way we do.

I took a CHL class last weekend and one of the other students is an airline pilot. USAF(Ret) ex F-16 and A-10 driver. (He also had the best shooting score, shooting an old S&W model 59). He said that not only has TSA moved the class for pilots who wish to be armed from Quantico VA to East Nowhere New Mexico, they've also decided to *charge* the pilots $6000 for the course. So the pilots have to arrange their schedules to have a full week off, travel on their own hook to the end of nowhere, and pay for the privelege. Needless to say, not many will.

[Darksheare]

Great.
So they don't want pilots to do it..
That zuxorz.

[shaggy eel]

ping

[El Gato]

I've never flown on a plane making the approach, but believe me, watching it from the ground is a little scary.

It's not so bad from the air, although I've only done it once 4+ years ago for a job interview. Nice view of stuff, but the low slow and vulnerable is pretty much true anywhere, and lots of places that "anywhere" is over a pretty densly populated area. (Dallas Love, LAX (when the approach isn't over water), LaGuardia (ditto) , St. Louis Lambert(sic) and many others I'm sure.) Dallas Love, and many other places, require such "dog leg" manuevers on take off to put the worst of the noise signature over a river, lake, or other unpopulated area.

[El Gato]

. I still have a hard time imagining how in any widebody airliner type you could "cut your signature and pull the nescessary 3.5+g turn to evade"

Well, I don't think I'd worry overly much about the signature part. For two reasons, one those big fan engines don't have that much of a heat signature anyway, as the cool air that bypasses the central core pretty well cools the exhast as well when it mixes with it. A 757 isn't an F-15 on burner after all. Second, since airliner engines are generally (727, DC-10/MD-11 and a few other excepted) mounted well out on wing pylons. Those little SAMs have little warheads and it they do manage to fly up the engine, they'll probalby not damage anything but the engine. So if you need to manuever, best keep the power up, or even increase it. If you lose one engine, it's bad, but not as bad as loosing the one or two of a fighter, where the engines are in the fuselodge and close together so that getting one probably means getting the other as well. I'd be interested to talk to an A-10 driver about that, as their situation is more akin to the airliner, with pod mounted engines (shielded by the tail from most directions) and a pretty high bypass ratio engine as well.

[nutmeg]

ping!

Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my infrequent ‘miscellaneous’ ping list.

[El Gato]

So they don't want pilots to do it..

They never had, the first head of TSA was an ex BATFer. I suspect he brought lots of like thinking types along with him, but they didn't leave when he did. Pity.

That zuxorz.

Indeed it does.

[Darksheare]

Well, when the TSA and such concluded, after a terror warning, that they didn't need so many air marshalls alot of people flipped.
So they changed their minds.
If enough people flip about this one, they'll change their minds again.
Trick is, getting enoug people to be angry about it.

[Paulie]

They just don't stop. At what point will the world unite and exterminate all of them? There's no middle ground - either we eliminate them or we're through.

[billhilly]

Are you an ERAU grad? If so, when?

[JETDRVR]

nope I wusnt. Just pointing out that alot of foreign nationals in question go to ERAU and other south florida AV schools. And thats disturbing to say the least!

[JETDRVR]

Very enlightening thanks. I agree a 757 certainly isnt a Eagle on burners, I guess my question is historicly other then Flight800 how many airliners have been targeted by SAMs? If you remember the UK operated Hawker that got plugged overhead Nigeria (late93, early 94) and managed to get into Lagos.( I was operating a corporate shuttle in there 3 months later) This guy was lucky to say the least. Apparently he had two launches at him, the first plugged his #2 iirc which seperated from the fuselage and the other SAM fixed on it with no futher damage to the ACFT.

[JETDRVR]

I agree , see my post to El Gato. I hope as the industry proceeds with Anti Missle defensive systems for Airline/Bizav/Private etc that all realistic scenarios are looked at. Trust me on the Bizavside of things, we have alot of nifty ghee whizardry that when it comes right down to aint worth the millions payed for the manf recommended AD or Servc Bulletins etc