Boeing’s airliner division boss says there are better ways to protect airliners from missiles than equipping them with countermeasures. Alan Mulally told Reuters such systems would be “very complex” (read: very expensive) and might not even work. “The best thing to do is to create an environment where (an attack) doesn’t happen or the consequences for that are very severe and not complicate the airplanes,” he said. Mulally said adding missile defenses would involve major changes to the systems of airliners and it would be hard to keep those systems up to date to match technology of the newer, faster and more accurate missiles constantly under development by the war machine. Many military airplanes can also use their speed and agility to augment the missile defenses. “You have to take out the threat … to make this terrorism unacceptable because you just can’t, at the end of the day, completely protect a commercial airplane,” he said.
Missile Defenses Not The Answer?
Key Takeaways:
- Boeing's airliner division boss, Alan Mulally, argues against equipping commercial planes with missile countermeasures due to their complexity, high cost, and potential ineffectiveness against evolving threats.
- Mulally advocates for preventing attacks by creating secure environments and ensuring severe consequences for terrorists, rather than adding complex systems to aircraft.
- He asserts that it's impossible to completely protect a commercial airplane and the focus should instead be on eliminating the threat itself and avoiding continuous, difficult updates to aircraft systems.
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