FedEx wants authorities to let it put anti-missile defense systems on its airplanes - SoyaCincau

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FedEx wants to install an anti-missile defense system on its planes that would emit infrared lasers to distract heat-seeking missiles targeting the plane.

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The Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 disaster in 2014 shocked the world, when it was shot down by a surface-to-air missile while flying over a war-torn area near the Ukraine-Russia border. Six years later, the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was also shot down by a missile shortly after take off from Tehran.

In a document to the US Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration , FedEx is requesting that they be allowed to modify their Airbus Model A321-200 airplanes to have a laser-based countermeasure against heat-seeking missiles. FedEx specifically cites ‘several incidents abroad’ where civilian aircraft were fired upon with man-portable air defense systems, and argues the need to protect their aircraft against such threats.

The laser-based anti-missile defense system that FedEx hopes to install is pretty much self-explanatory. This won’t destroy the missile though, but rather creates heat elsewhere, interrupting the heat-seeking tracking of the missile; heat-seeking missiles typically hit planes by tracking the hot air being exhausted from the jet engine of the airplane. By shooting an infrared beam at the missile, it would hopefully disrupt the missile’s ability to track the heat coming off the airplane.

On top of that, Israel’s commercial passenger airplanes also have their own form of anti-missile systems on board. Such systems have been on El-Al Airlines airplanes since 2004, before being rolled out to other Israeli airlines as well. The original generation of anti-missile defense systems on El-Al planes had been flare-based, meaning that when a heat-seeking missile is targeting the plane, it would shoot out a bunch of flares to confuse and distract the missile.

FedEx’s application is scheduled to be published on the 18 of January, but you can already check it out on the

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