Ireland's Potential 911...an interesting scenario

Sparks

Originally posted by thejollyrodger
But please do the math properly. These planes dont cost the billions that everyone says they do.

The actual aircraft themselves don't, that's true - they run to between 25 and 100 million, depending on make, model, etc. But the amount it would cost to field an operational squadron, even a four-aircraft squadron, would be the guts of a billion euro, if not more. Not only do you have to buy the actual aircraft, you have to upgrade facilities, train pilots (which requires you to buy more aircraft to act as trainers, as well as invest in a lot more ground equipment because flying fast jets is a very demanding task and there are major differences between a Cessna and a Fouga, let alone a Cessna and a MiG-29). Then you have to allow for armament, including a budget for live-fire training exercises for training; maintainance costs including spare parts, training, extra people and so on (and those costs are not just for the four-fighter squadron, but for the training aircraft as well), and all you get from this is four aircraft. Now the thing is, four aircraft can't provide fighter cover on a 24-7 basis. You can't simply keep aircraft on 24-hour call all year round. You can't even do it on shifts. Aircraft have wear-and-tear problems, jets more than piston-engined aircraft because of the way the engines work and the higher dynamic stress. Ergo, you need nearly sixteen aircraft to do the job. That's four aircraft per unit, with one unit on standby on the runway, one unit in training, and two in maintainance on a rotating shift basis. And the aircraft won't last for long even at that level of usage - two to four years at the outside.
So, well over a billion (16 aircraft - even at the bargain basement price of 25 million each - comes to four hundred million before you even buy jet fuel) euro spent, and you have two to four years of coverage which will do the wonderful job of arriving overhead a smoking hole in the ground two minutes after it used to be a 737...

To say nothing of the damage caused by the CIRA/RIRA/UDF/whomever, who kept leaving carbombs all over the shop, against which the fighter jet is as much a deterrent as a giant foam tennis racket, and the Gardai we need to prevent this aren't there because the billion-odd euro spent on the fighters was taken from a budget which was supposed to pay for 2000 extra gardai, but something had to be cut to come up with the billion euro; and of course we have no air ambulance service and in fact the ground ambulance service is now somewhat underfunded because of the budget cuts in the Health service; the capital spending programme on roads and schools and so on has been slashed; and in fact, there's not much investment going on in any of the "non-core" areas because of the new fighter squadron.

And of course, there's the fact that airforces with fast jets have accidents. Training, bird strikes, equipment failure - they're all pretty close to unavoidable, unfortunately. Which means that one day, one of our 30-million euro jets may smack into a pigeon over Trinity College at 270 knots, and the now-critically-injured pilot will do what every fast jet pilot is trained to do in such a situation - he'll try to point the nose at Dublin Bay and pull the ejection handles. Maybe it works - and maybe we get a MiG-29 with live weapons and a tank or two of jet fuel slamming into O'Connell street because the pilot passed out during the turn.

Offhand, and you realise this is just a looney-left, tree-hugging, long-haired pinko commie hippie's opinion, I'd say it's a bad idea...

Sparks

Originally posted by RicardoSmith
I don't think the that 747 or the C5 would have anything more in that regard than a civilian airliner but I don't know for sure. Be curious to find to find out. The sidewinder is more powerful, but I still don't think it would take out an big jet unless you got a lucky strike on something very vital.

What little there is in the way of case studies on the "shooting down civilian airliners with air-to-air missiles" topic seems to suggest that a sidewinder does an effective job of removing an engine from a wing - but it takes a few hits to actually turn your average 747 into a rapidly-dispersing cloud of debris.
However, it's a moot point because there's only one AAM that could shoot down an airliner so that a few hundred tons of debris doesn't land on the poor sods underneath the flight path - and somehow I don't think they'd appreciate a nuclear-tipped AAM being used some 20,000 feet above their heads...

hoolio

Question for anyone who knows more then me:

Whenever i see people talking about this i'd always wondered would it not be possible to simply take over control of the hijacked aircraft from the ground.So what i'm suggesting would happen would be something like an airplane is hijacked,stops responding or goes off course.The most senior ATC sends a signal,specific to that aircraft.The signal is detected by the onboard computer,instantly the plane ignores all manual input,climbs to 25000 feet,heads out to sea and circles until further notice.

Wouldn't this surely be cheap,effective and do-able?To upgrade the computer would mostly be software/maybe some sort of seperate concealed reciever so a terrorist couldnt just break it.I mean from a technical standpoint surely you can program the plane to disregard the pilots commands and to take altitude/direction/throttle commands from the ground.If it was a false alarm the plane could just be told to accept the pilots directions again.I guess the problems could come if you had a plane with terrorists in the cockpit circling over the atlantic - what would you do with them.

But anyway wouldnt what i'm suggesting be possible? Or am i talking bollocks (which TBH is always a possibility)

Turkey

Just a couple of points, I am having a lot of trouble with Boards. for some reason so visits are getting necessarly rare.
Bonkey, there was something ridiculous about that statement of yours saying there was anything ridiculous about my statement.:D
Ricardo, just to clear up my statement about the C-130, it is the opinion of 2 C-130 pilots I know that a landing in Abbeyshrule is not a good idea, it's to do with how damp and unstable the ground is under the runway, one of them has flown there several times in a light aircraft, I would belive them sooner then I would belive a Lockheed-martin salesman.
As for wishes to purchase a JSF, I think our debate led rather firmly away from that overweight junk pile, personally I do not belive it will ever see service, not in it's present form, anyway.
Jolleyroger is almost right, over their very long life jets will cost a lot of money to keep, but we can well aford it, price is not an issue.
Finally before anyone reading this expires due to terminal boredom, I made an error on last nights post which was serious enough in my mind to justify several attempts during today to correct , finishing in an e-mail to the site owners, requesting that they remove the post. I wish they had.
There have been 3 , not 2 shoot downs of modern civillian airliners, [confirmed, there may be more]:
one of the worst single events in Middle East history was the shooting down of an Iranian Airlines B757 by an american Frigate in the Gulf, the fault seems to rest squarly on the frigate captains shoulders. There were no survivors.
My apoligies.

Take care all.

luckat

Quote: "Why do we always have this thread about fighter planes every couple of months."

Boys with small penises, I think.

It would be my personal opinion that it's more effective to find out why people want to kill you and correct whatever is the reason, than to set out to kill them.

Sparks

Originally posted by Turkey
Jolleyroger is almost right, over their very long life jets will cost a lot of money to keep, but we can well aford it, price is not an issue.

If price was not an issue, we'd have motorway roads all over the country, one-to-one teacher-pupil ratios, no hospital waiting lists, dozens of air ambulances, thousands of highly-trained paramedics instead of EMTs, schools and colleges wouldn't be coping with huge cutbacks, we'd have ten thousand more Gardai than we do, and in fact, we'd be in a much better state than we are now.
Fact is, price is an issue. An incredibly important issue, in fact - and we can't afford to have a properly-funded fighter squadron. End of story. Let's revisit this when someone discovers the world's largest uranium deposit in the midlands somewhere...

Sparks

Originally posted by hoolio
Whenever i see people talking about this i'd always wondered would it not be possible to simply take over control of the hijacked aircraft from the ground.

Thing is, there are some problems:

1) Software is the least reliable thing we do. And only recently we saw the Chinook crash from some years ago brought up again - the FADEC (Full Authority Digital Engine Contol) system on the helicopter there decided to go to a full power climb at an unfortunate point in the flight plan, put the chinook into cloud at exactly the time that the pilots needed to see to turn to avoid terrain and as a result several people died. That kind of software glitch also put an Airbus prototype into a forest during an airshow a few years ago because the flight control system decided to wait before going to full throttle until it was too late to avoid terrain. And there have been many other examples.

2) If you can control the aircraft from the ground, you don't need 17 trained and educated suicide-bomber types. You need one chap with computer skills and a few to break him into an ATC centre, a bit of torture to get the codes and then bob's your uncle, you can crash each and every aircraft in the air in less than a half-hour. Total death toll would be somewhere north of 100,000 people...

3) How would a full-authority flight control system get an aircraft from over Heuston to over water before the terrorists can blow it up and kill all the people in the aircraft and under the flight path?

4) (or 3A if you think of it) How would a full-authority flight control system prevent the terrorists from blowing up the aircraft?

5) Let's say it works perfectly. You now have a 737 orbiting out over Dublin Bay at 20,000 feet in the control of terrorists, with maybe a half-hour of fuel remaining. How do you save the passangers?

blobert

I'm very impressed (slightly worried) by all of your knowledge of planes and missiles.
Can't see anyone wanting to, or indeed attacking Ireland though...

Sparks

Originally posted by blobert
I'm very impressed (slightly worried) by all of your knowledge of planes and missiles.

Don't be - I mean, if you asked me about motorcycles or cars, I could just about distinguish the two. Swings and roundabouts and all that.

hoolio

Ok i know thats simplistic to say the least but for the sake of argument:

1)Ok i take your point - we can't program a reliable version of windows,let alone a plane but would it not be simple enough to issue a command to make the plane climb as fast as safely possible to its near maximum altitude,then to make it turn.I was kind of assuming that the system would be activated long before it came near to the city/target so it would still probably be at cruising altitude so terrain wouldn't be a problem.There wouldnt really be anything for it to crash into would there
(hence the climb part)

2)Ok let be ammend the plan here.Each plane has a unique code,unknown to anyone,but stored in a safe in some military base/secure facility etc.Senior ATC rings the base,man with privledged access goes into safe,gets code,tells it to ATC,ATC uses code.Plane recieved code,climbs and turns.And anyway i'm not suggesting that they would have control over the aircraft in a remote control car sense so you wouldnt be able to hack the plane's computer and crash it from the ground,you woudlnt be able to give it specific directions - it could be programmed so that upon recieving the signal the plane climbs to altitude X and goes to location Y. (Location Y being a certain place pre determined by what part of the world the plane is in)

3)Ok the plane computer would have a map of all nearby geographical features,cities,nuclear plants,densly populated areas and such.It would calculate a very simple plan (preferably a straight line) that would keep it from passing over any of these and take it to the nearest 'safest' place - the sea,a big lake,the desert,mountains,the least populated areas.So that way if the terrorists blew up the they would only succeed in killing relatively few people (i know what a horrible statement that is ,but i'm not saying that it's ok if the passengers die,but at least they couldnt hit a buidling and kill thousands).

4)Well i guess it couldnt(don't worry i'm not going to start suggesting crazy b-movie theories of planes realeasing gas into the cabins to knock everyone out).But like i said at least the deaths would be minimalAnd it would give the passengers a fighting chance..Actually how easy would it actually be to down plane from the inside if you don't have control?I mean they could hardly bring a bomb on board.(right?)

5)Yeah i saw that problem when i was typing my original post but well how do you save the passengers in any hi-jacking event of this type.I mean either the plane will hit its target killing the passengers,or it might crash/be shot down killing the passengers.I don't think there is any way to save them as long as terrorists willing to die have control of the plane.I suppose the only is if the passengers regained control of the plane,thats the only way to save the passengers,with or without any automated control system.

I hope that clears things up abit.I know its a dodgy plan to say the least as i know precisely nothing about aviation but it makes sense in my mind,enough sense that its worth looking at anyway.If you could make some sort of system whereby you could at least restrict a plane from entering airspace of cities etc it would be useful.

RicardoSmith

A remote control is possible, but its not economical to do it.

The airline manufactures are aware of a few design flaws that cause airline crashes every few years and have worked out that it more economical to pay the law suits than fix the aircraft.

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by Turkey
Just a couple of points, I am having a lot of trouble with Boards. for some reason so visits are getting necessarly rare.

Me too. Whats the story. My dialup is screwed, Boards is up and down like a yoyo lately.

Originally posted by Turkey
Bonkey, there was something ridiculous about that statement of yours saying there was anything ridiculous about my statement.:D
Ricardo, just to clear up my statement about the C-130, it is the opinion of 2 C-130 pilots I know that a landing in Abbeyshrule is not a good idea, it's to do with how damp and unstable the ground is under the runway, one of them has flown there several times in a light aircraft, I would belive them sooner then I would belive a Lockheed-martin salesman.
[/B]

What salesman are you talking about. C130's have been landing on rough air strips for a couple of decades now.

Basically you're saying they built Abbeyshrule on a bog. Well thats just stupid.
Who do they fly the 130's for?

Originally posted by Turkey
As for wishes to purchase a JSF, I think our debate led rather firmly away from that overweight junk pile, personally I do not belive it will ever see service, not in it's present form, anyway.
[/B]

Which one? theres a few of them. The debate I saw didn't, they closed it because they didn't like anyone arguing with them. They want to be left alone to dream about stealth fighters and such. Best to leave them in their own world.

Originally posted by Turkey
....one of the worst single events in Middle East history was the shooting down of an Iranian Airlines B757 by an american Frigate in the Gulf, the fault seems to rest squarly on the frigate captains shoulders. There were no survivors.
My apoligies.
Take care all. [/B]

Not surprised. Have you seen the size of a US Navy SAM missile. Its huge. As someone posted below, the hand held SA 7 has a warhead of 1.19 kg , the Sidewinder missile has a warhead of 9kgs. The warhead on a ship launched SAM is about 90kgs, about 5 meters long, and has a lot more kinetic energy aswell. Its also a semi active Radar. So its not a valid comparision in a preventing a 9/11 attack.

Sparks

Originally posted by hoolio
1) ... would it not be simple enough to issue a command to make the plane climb as fast as safely possible to its near maximum altitude,then to make it turn.

In a word, no. Thing is that airliners in controlled airspace are actually rather close to one another. And aircraft just turning and climbing at random would play merry havoc with an ATC system and risk a mid-air collision at best.

2)Ok let be ammend the plan here.Each plane has a unique code,unknown to anyone,but stored in a safe in some military base/secure facility etc.

And now the US military has the codes for Canadian aircraft? Or the Irish military has the codes for UK aircraft? I can see that working rather poorly - and you can't really depend on a foreign military having codes for their aircraft - if it's a Canadian airplane en route to slamming into Leinster House, you would want the codes right there, not having to go through diplomatic channels with two minutes to impact...

3)Ok the plane computer would have a map of all nearby geographical features,cities,nuclear plants,densly populated areas and such.

For it's entire flight plan? For some aircraft (say on the LA-NY run), that would be one huge database...

4)...But like i said at least the deaths would be minimal

Actually, deaths would be minimal if you caught the terrorists at the airport before they got on the plane... which, oddly enough, is the solution advocated by the Airline Pilots Associations both in the US and the UK and here...

hoolio

Ok you've got me,i get that what i'm saying is too simplistic and yeah the best cure is always prevention but you always need contingencies and tbh to me anything is better then shooting down a plane onto a crowded shopping centre.I mean as of right now thats most likely what would happen if a plane was hijacked isn't it.

Could you program a relatively small number of restricted sites into a planes computer? I.e. that a plane would not allow it's pilot to fly directly over the White House/nuclear sites etc. But i'm guessing that would bring me back to the problem of a plane taking action of it's own accord would probably crash into another plane wouldnt it.

I mean surely you can influence a plane to stop it crashing somehow.Even though now the threat of a plane being hi-jacked is almost nil but you should still have a system in place just in case the screening pre-takeoff measures fail.

Sparks

Originally posted by hoolio
I mean surely you can influence a plane to stop it crashing somehow.

It'd be nice if you could, we'd have crash-proof planes then...

RicardoSmith

Originally posted by Sparks
It'd be nice if you could, we'd have crash-proof planes then...

Its simple. Go to preferences, and tick the box beside invunerable. Works in every sim I have.