Shoulder-Fired Missiles An Ever-Present Threat To U.S. Planes -- Pajamas MediaTwo years after 9/11, Colin Powell stated that “no threat is more serious to aviation” than shoulder-fired missiles. Not much has changed.
Back when the Afghan mujahideen were fighting the infidel Russians, the weapon of choice to take down Russian aircraft was the shoulder-fired missile, or SFM. So prevalent were these missiles, the fighters created a special kind of donkey saddle to get the missiles higher up into the mountains and closer to the targeted airplanes. The preferred model was the 50-pound SA-7 — ironically built by the Soviets.
The recent WikiLeaks leak has revealed information regarding the status of SFMs in Afghanistan today. The biggest revelation is not that incidents involving SFMs have happened, but that they haven’t happened more often.
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My Comment: I completely agree with the last sentence of this post ....
The quiet fear among U.S. aviation bureaucrats is what might happen if a commercial passenger jet were to be shot down by an SFM over the continental United States. Many Americans would stop flying, certainly for a while.
Why bother boarding a plane, just having ten placed fanatics located at crucial airports with shoulder-fired missiles .... well .... the impact would be overwhelming and aviation as we know it will be impacted for years.
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