U.S. Rep. Steve Israel of New York’s Long Island sees the jets come and go from Kennedy International Airport and worries about a terrorist threat that no amount of baggage scanning can stop.
Suppose a terrorist managed to smuggle a shoulder-launched missile to within a mile or so of the airfield, he said. Fired from a rooftop, a patch of woodland or even a highway overpass, the heat-seeking missile could bring down a plane and kill hundreds.
Such an attack could paralyze the U.S. aviation industry like nothing before, Israel contends.
"This is the most glaring vulnerability that we have," said Israel, whose 2nd District is a few miles from New York’s major airports. "It wouldn’t even have to hit. A missile attack would be the effective end of the aviation industry as we know it, and that would have a catastrophic effect on our economy."
Israel, a Democrat, and Rep. John Mica, the Florida Republican who heads the House subcommittee on aviation, are among several members of Congress who say the nation is moving too slowly to defend commercial airliners against portable surface-to-air missile systems, known as SAMs.
They say spending whatever it takes — some estimate the cost as high as $10 billion — to install missile defenses on every commercial airliner is worth doing. On March 30, they introduced a bill calling on the Federal Aviation Administration to put approval of missile-defense systems on a fast track.
Already the Department of Homeland Security has set aside $60 million to develop and test a defensive system. In January, three contractors were hired to design ways to adapt the missile-defeating technology installed in military jets for use on the bigger, slower airliners.
With more than 500,000 SAMs spread throughout the arsenals of armies around the globe and about 1,000 believed to be in the hands of al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, experts agree the threat is genuine but hard to quantify. Coalition forces captured nearly 5,600 missiles during the invasion of Afghanistan, and a similar number may remain in the hands of Iraqi insurgents, the Congressional Research Service says.
The bill backed by Israel and Mica would expedite installation of missile-defense systems in about 300 airliners used by the military to move troops overseas. The legislation also calls for stronger efforts to "buy back" SAMs that are on the black market.
"We have to go on the offense and defense at the same time," Israel said. "Every unit we take out of their hands … is one less threat to U.S. aviation."
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