Congress still undecided on how to protect airliners from missiles.

LOS ANGELES -- Tests of a system designed to protect commercial aircraft from shoulder-fired missiles have showed some improved performance in areas such as maintenance. But the system still fails short of goals acceptable to airlines, said the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of the program.

Congress has mandated that the department's science and technology directorate find a system capable of defeating man-portable air defense systems, or manpads. Earlier this year, DHS officials and contractors conducted a pilot program to see if a directed infrared counter-measure (DIRCM) system could withstand the rigors of flying on a commercial airliner.

Results showed that the typical DIRCM pod could fly for about 1,000 hours before it had to be swapped out, said Jim Turtle, head of the directorate's explosives division. That is a 10-fold increase from the 100 hours that the system is able to operate aboard military aircraft, he said. The problem is that these numbers need to get up to about 5,000 hours.

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"We [improved] an order of magnitude, but we still have to do another order of magnitude," Tuttle told National Defense.

Studies have shown that operating these systems will be costly for either the airlines or taxpayers--about $1 million to outfit one plane, Tuttle added. That excludes maintenance costs. Who would foot the bill has yet to be determined.

Tuttle said the DIRCM can shoot down missiles successfully, but maintenance and logistics issues are still the sticking points.

These issues are major concerns for the airline companies. Industry studies estimate that it could cost between $300 and $400 to operate the counter-manpads system per flight. That figure is far too high for a business that operates on thin profit margins, the studies have said.

"It still goes back to the issue of maintainability, reliability and supportability," Tuttle said.

A nine-month test last year using a Northrop Grumman-built counter-man-pads system aboard 12 Federal Express transports showed that if there was a malfunction, the modular design made them easy to swap out. The process took about 10 minutes, Turtle said. But that would mean pre-positioning $1 million replacement modules around the country and flying broken DIRCMs back to a repair depot.

"If these things could last four or five years, then it's reasonable that you could do that," Turtle said. A typical jetliner undergoes a routine overhaul every four to five years, he said.

The armed services developed the technology to protect its aircraft, but military and civilian aviation are "like night and day," he added.

Commercial airliners are constantly in the air to maximize profits, and repairs add time and costs that airlines say they cannot afford.

The Air Transport Association, a group representing airlines, has called for more research into solutions that don't involve installing the expensive technology onto aircraft, such as airport perimeter defenses. An issue brief said the threat is "real and must be taken seriously." However, it notes that there are other threats such as rocket-propelled grenades and .50 caliber bullets, which may have an equally high risk to commercial airliners. The modules should last 10,000 hours without breaking down, which is double DHS' goal, the association said.

Proponents note that the economic impact of an attack on U.S. aviation could be equally costly--as much as $15 billion, according to a Rand Corp. report.

In the meantime, Congress gave the directorate $35 million this year to extend the research phase, thereby postponing the difficult decisions on whether the program should move forward, and if so, who will pay for it.

This time, three American Airlines passenger jets will be equipped with a system built by BAE Systems in an effort to collect 7,000 hours worth of data over nine months.

About $6 million of the funds will go to test alternatives such as ground-based or unmanned aerial vehicle-based systems, Tuttle said.

That would entail a missile warning system at every airport, and a high-energy laser system to knock down the manpads. Questions remain on what a high-energy beam will do to the plane's avionics, or other electronics such as a passenger's pacemaker, he said.

Detlof Von Winterfeldt, director of the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis at the University of Southern California, and co-author of a report on the economic impact of deploying such a system, said the costs are still "too high."

"Overall, it's not time to jump into this," he said at a DHS science and technology conference sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association.

One option might be to outfit only some jetliners with the full system. The rest of the bubble-shaped pods would be dummies. It may not matter if the terrorists know this or not, he suggested.

His center has done some studies on the effectiveness of "randomization"--the science of ensuring that a potential terrorist can never be certain that a checkpoint, for example, would be in place or not, thus diminishing their confidence that an attack would succeed.

"I think that could be quite effective," he said.

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