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Home Front
Company Proposes Ground Laser To Protect Jetliners
2004-01-28
EFL
Northrop Grumman is proposing to develop a laser potentially capable of defending civilian airliners at U.S. airports from terrorist-fired missiles.
This'll cause the lefties to go scurrying to see how much Northrup donated to Bush-Cheney...
Placed at or near an airport, the laser would react "at the speed of light" to destroy any heat-seeking missile streaking up at a passenger jet, said Pat Caruana, vice president for Northrop Grumman Space Technology, in an interview... Dubbed the Hazardous Ordnance Engagement Toolkit, which shortens to the more user-friendly HORNET, the system is a direct descendant of the company’s Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL)... "Transit time from energy source to target is the speed of light," said Caruana. Being tied into the airport radar would save money by not requiring an independent radar. Also, the more HORNET is integrated into airport infrastructure, the better for its effectiveness and for public acceptance about its use, he said. Although company literature shows a drawing of a HORNET system mounted on a truck, Caruana said that idea is really notional. "The idea would be to put this somewhere where it would be as unobtrusive as any other feature aligned with an airport," he said. "Conceivably, you could put this on top of a tall building somewhere and nobody would ever see it."

While hitting a 152mm howitzer shell or a Katyusha rocket in flight is an impressive feat, those projectiles fall along a predictable path. Surface-to-air missiles are different, but still follow a "fairly proscribed route" on their way to intercept an airplane, Caruana said. "The development of algorithms to accommodate this is well within hand," he said. "There is always a technical challenge, but I believe that the solution is bounded by virtue of what we’ve done to date." Caruana acknowledged that there would likely be public concern about using a high-energy laser around airports and inside urban areas, but emphasized that the system does not pose a hazard. For one thing, it is eye safe. Furthermore, the system’s design would prevent it from obliterating an airliner or something else by accident, he said, because it would be programmed only to track and destroy surface-to-air missiles, which have distinct characteristics. SAMS, whether command guided or heat-seeking, present sensors with the same signature: They are hot and moving very fast. Civilian airliners do not jump off the ground and accelerate immediately to the speed of sound, making them hard to confuse with missiles, he said. The laser is also precise enough to go after a missile in a crowded airport environment without hitting other planes. Caruana could not comment on the size of the beam or how long it takes to destroy a missile, but he said the strength of the beam can be varied and the time is "very short." "If it were not adequate to do this mission, we would not have proposed HORNET as aggressively as we have," he said.

I prefer this solution over the plane based solutions for several reasons:
1. The cost of the plane-based solution sound like it would be unfunded requirement placed on already struggling airline industry.
2. The requirement would not have been feasible to place of foriegn airlines.
3. Small commuter air planes would have been unprotected.
4. This solution can eventually be transfered to better protect our military heliocopters.
5. This system can be backfitted on ships which will eliminate some of the need for AAW missile systems. Every AAW missile displaced is another TLAM in the holster.
Posted by:Super Hose

#1  Every AAW missile displaced is another TLAM in the holster. Except that these sorts of lasers usually require large amounts of noxious chemicals....
Posted by: Phil Fraering   2004-1-29 1:24:24 AM  

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