Survivability of Aircraft to Terrorist Missile Threats

The need to protect airliners from terrorist manpad missiles has been underscored by recent events in which missiles were fired at commercial airliners as well as wide body aircraft flying into and out of Baghdad airport. The U.S. Government is looking at military aircraft protection systems in an attempt to extend this military technology to civilian airliners. This phase I SBIR researched a completely new protection concept called aim point biasing (APB) designed specifically for civilian airliner self-protection from MANPAD missiles. APB can provide airliner protection at approximately 6% the cost of the military systems. It has no explosive class B or C components as do some of the proposed protection systems. Our phase I research verified through modeling and simulations that MANPADS missiles will be drawn to the APB infrared sources thereby protecting the aircraft from being impacted at critical flight components such as the engine or wing tanks. Phase II will complete the feasibility demonstration of this research by: 1) designing and fabricating two prototype APB systems (vertical stabilizer pod and winglet) and 2) demonstrating the IR intensity and ruggedness of these prototypes to operate in the airliner environment.