ABC News has a story up today about a pet peeve of mine. It's the failure to do anything about the threat of shoulder fired missiles (MANPADS) hitting commercial airliners. The fact that we haven't done anything about this threat is beyond ridiculous, because the simple fact is, if one shoulder fired missile hits one commercial airliner ever, that's it for the airline industry. It's done.
How much will it cost to retrofit the current commercial fleet? An embarrassingly small $10 billion dollars. You may think that's a lot of money, and it is, but the inevitable collapse of air travel if someone manages to bring down an airliner in the United States would cost the country as much as a hundred times that amount of money in lost travel and tourism.
We all saw what kind of hit the economy took after 9/11. This would be much, much worse, and the bottom line is that after it happened we'd have to retrofit the fleet anyway or nobody would ever fly again. We should be proactive about this and do it now.
The only question is who is going to pay for it. The airlines just don't have the money to do it, and government intervention is going to lead to every other business with terrorist threats coming to the US government for a handout rather than pay their own way.
The solution has got to come in the form of long term government backed loans to the airlines to be paid for with say, a $5 surcharge per ticket sold. I'd pay that to keep my ass from being blown out of the sky, wouldn't you?
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