Wednesday - September 03, 2014

An Easy Fix For Those Captured Airliners

Islamist militias in Libya took control of nearly a dozen commercial jetliners last month, and western intelligence agencies recently issued a warning that the jets could be used in terrorist attacks across North Africa.

Intelligence reports of the stolen jetliners were distributed within the U.S. government over the past two weeks and included a warning that one or more of the aircraft could be used in an attack later this month on the date marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, said U.S. officials familiar with the reports.

“There are a number of commercial airliners in Libya that are missing,” said one official. “We found out on September 11 what can happen with hijacked planes.”

The official said the aircraft are a serious counterterrorism concern because reports of terrorist control over the Libyan airliners come three weeks before the 13th anniversary of 9/11 attacks and the second anniversary of the Libyan terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.

Libya remains an oil-rich state and if the country is taken over completely by Islamist extremists, U.S. counterterrorism officials believe it will become another terrorist safe haven in the region.

The officials said U.S. intelligence agencies have not confirmed the aircraft theft following the takeover of Tripoli International Airport in late August, and are attempting to locate all aircraft owned by two Libyan state-owned airline companies, as security in the country continued to deteriorate amid fighting between Islamists and anti-Islamist militias.

The stories don’t make it real clear whether these jets have been captured in place, or have been moved. Pull up Tripoli International on the digital map (32.676408, 13.154844) and you’ll see dozens of jets there. Granted, it’s not a recent image; Google and Bing don’t have access to realtime spysat data. Yet.

But if the planes are there, and we know Libya is a total mess (gee thanks for that Obama) and we haven’t hesitated to attack before, why not just drop a few JDAMs? I’m sure a 250lb bomb will mess up a 747 pretty well.

And if the planes aren’t there? Well, the world is a very well connected place these days. And every single jet out there has a unique transponder code. And every single jet known to have been left in Libya can have it’s code highlighted. Simple fix. A little shell script inserted into the flight tracking radar system scans for the ID codes. All of them; it’s not like there are 100 million airliners flying around. Maybe 20,000? 30,000 tops. A microsecond’s search for a computer. Any plane with a phony code or one of these Libyan codes gets a missile. Period. Game over. Oh, your IFF system isn’t working today? Better not fly that plane Bubba. Period. Shouldn’t be too hard to get a position update every 4 hours into the systems either. Just in case some tricksy terrorists want to hack their transponders and use someone else’s legitimate code. Those flights would have to be diverted, and if they don’t, blast them. Period.

Maybe we shouldn’t have thrown away all those marvelous anti-aircraft missiles we built back in the 60s.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/03/2014 at 11:01 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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