"If they already have the weapons and are in place with orders to use them, there isn't anything the government *can* do, other than annex, raze, and pave a 40 mile radius around every airport."
That's just a defeatist attitute, if there are MANPADs out there and unaccounted for then we should be searching for them, we should install systems on commercial planes that at least give them a chance of evading the missles, I'd rather some chance than no chance at all.
heck a $11 billion can be misplaced in a typo in our budget and it would be a good lil infusion into American Tech industries, no outsourced China or India company can do that kinda work.
MANPADS are not tracked like nuclear warheads. There have been several thousand "lost" over the years, including the Stingers we sent to Afghanistan, the Strelas sent to Soviet client states, and Egypt's handing out of "free" Strela-clones to anyone who says they hate Israel, to name a few. On top of that, there are countries like France that will sell current generation MANPADS systems to anyone with money.
Adding threat-warning recievers to civilian transport aircraft will do nothing but waste money and tell the crew of the plane that they're about to die. They have no altitude or airspeed to evade, and a big lumbering airliner in landing configuration is not agile at all. If you're a landing transport in a current-generation MANPADS' close attack envelope when it launches, you're dead. Period. The solution is to find and capture or kill the people responsible for organizing, supplying, funding, and ordering such attacks and the states that support them. Which we *are* doing, or you would have seen American airliners get hit by MANPADS missiles before now.
Think otherwise? If you're close enough to take the following picture, you're close enough to put a missile into a plane. How exactly, is this plane supposed to evade a missile? Or, for that matter, an unguided RPG, a burst of gunfire into the cockpit, or any of the hundred other ways you can bring down an aircraft?
