One natural EMP weapon is a lightning strike -- which hit airplanes frequently. Hence they are hardened against it, especially the fly-by-wire types. So the likelyhood of a raghead in a dingy aiming his Acme EMP-ray at craft 3000 feet up and bringing the bird down is -- very very small.
In my opinion, Nita nupress may just have a very valid concern. Please review the web page listed below. I have included a short section identifying the Dept. of Defense concerns.
the scientist tinkered and soon put together two crude weapons. The smaller one was designed so it could be broken down into two parcels and shipped by United Parcel Service from one terrorist to another. The larger was built into a converted Volkswagen bus. Both used ordinary spark plugs to generate the pulse, commercially available coils, common capacitors and simple copper tape. “We wanted to show that by backyard means a weapons system could be built that would have some effectiveness against our civilian infrastructure,” Schriner explained during an April 30 demonstration at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.
One incident that made U.S. military planners take notice of the threat occurred a few years ago when a U.S. Comanche helicopter flying out of the now-decommissioned Griffis Air Force base in Rome, N.Y., took out the entire navigational-aids system at the nearby commercial airport. The helicopter had generated a low-level RF pulse during a radar test “which ended up totally disrupting the global positioning system (GPS) being used to land commercial aircraft in Albany, New York, for a couple of weeks,” reveals James F. O’Bryon, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation Live-Fire Testing Center, which is studying the impact of EMP and RF weapons on U.S. military systems.
The military began testing Schriner’s prototype weapons last year in an effort to determine the vulnerability of common electronic devices such as desktop computers, medical pumps and monitors, home-alarm systems and police scanners. In tests so far, Schriner’s devices have temporarily disrupted all of them.
A high-powered weapon used by a terrorist could have a far greater impact than freezing computers or turning off intravenous pumps. To illustrate his point, Schriner presented a fictional case.
Right. Just like the likelihood of a group of nineteen ragheads in hijacked airliners simultaneously aiming their airborne weapons of mass destruction at the World Trade Center twin towers 100+ stories up and bringing the towers down was -- very, very small.
By the way, the statement I posted above about "terrorists parked at the end of the airport runway to debilitate airplanes taking off or landing" was not made by some tin foil hat "conspiracist." It was made by the Chairman of the Special Oversight Panel on Terrorism of the Committee on Armed Services.
Your tendency for histrionic statements is yet another reason why you were not pinged to this conversation.