LTTE Potential Air Threat

Herold Leelawardena, Malagala, Padukka.

It’s only a few weeks back; the opposition leader, Ranil Wickramasinghe had blamed the defense secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse for not shielding our airport from the LTTE air attack. His phobia had been so great; he demanded Gotabhaya Rajapakse to be sacked and Janake Perera be appointed in his place. None of us doubt that Janake Perera had been an outstanding General. In fact, he should have been the army commander a long way back. Why Wickramasinghe choose Austin Fernando and not Janake as his defense secretary in 2002 could be a puzzle for everyone.

My endeavor here is not to evaluate Wickramasinghe’s missed opportunities, follies or wisdom in granting our north and east real estate in a platter to LTTE; but to present a study on whether our airport or other key places for that matter could be safe guarded from a future LTTE air attack, if any.

According experts of small planes, no place on earth, not even the white house is totally safe from an air attack by a determined terrorist. If you read on you will see why. Facts gathered from their write-ups reveal; a determined terrorist outfits are quite capable of organizing a lethal air raids at will. Perhaps this could be one of the reasons why the US and its allies pursue Alkida to its dens.

Now, we ought to understand that LTTE too has the skills, capabilities to assemble an armada of slow moving airplanes in Wanni Jungle, and mount any number of air attacks to anywhere in Sri Lanka.

Many pundits accuse the government for not having functioning radars to protect our assets. Whether these pundits had analyzed the effectiveness of the radars in the face of simple but terrifying flying machines is indeed doubtful. My study shows that no Sri Lankan location is safe from LTTE if they are to possess such airplanes in spite of us having any type of ground based radars.

Before presenting few facts about small airplanes and their deadly capabilities; I would like to mention an anecdote that most of us knew. That is; in 1987, a German national named Mathias Rust landed his single engine Cessna on tightly guarded the Kremlin's Red Square by flying low enough to not trigger Russian defense warnings. In spite of the Cessna is made of metal with a solid radar signature no Russian radar had manage to detect it. Even so, Russians had detected and brought down an American supersonic spy plane that flew over 60,000 ft high up in the sky decades before that astonishing event. Maybe for that reason, Russian military believed not even a bird could fly over their heads without their knowledge.

Therefore we could conclude that, it is not unprecedented for small planes to penetrate where supersonic bombers cannot go. With all due respect to Janaka Perera, it is doubtful he could have prevented that LTTE air attack thus. Hence, it is up to the reader to decide whether Wickramasinghe had been playing politics with national security when he demanded Gotabhaya to resign.

The plane named "Piper Cub Offense" is simpler airplane than Cessna. The idea is named after one of aviation's most famous planes: The Piper Cub. This aircraft is a small two-seater, first produced in the 1930s and still popular with pilots. Enthusiasts of this plane say; it could do what Cessna did even better.

Now the apprehension for us today is; inexpensive two-person kit aircraft of even smaller size that are available off the shelf in the hobby stores of the US. These kit airplanes are very easy to assemble. Such amateur-built planes have only fabric-covered wooden frames and tiny one- or two-cylinder engines that are the only significant masses of metal in them. An airplane akin to what I have described above had been taken in to protective custody by Negambo Police recently. Anyway, once in air, these airplanes are about as noticeable on an air traffic controller's radar screen as a stealth bomber would be, and nothing more. We all know that the stealth bomber is designed to evade radar reflections.

Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh computer project at Apple says; Compared to a jet, their infrared emissions are negligible, and they would not be seen by heat-seeking detectors. These tiny airplanes look anything but threatening. Put a few pounds of Sarin or Anthrax spores bag in one of its seats and you could wipe out a city with a home-built, low-tech aircraft.

Jef goes further and say; much cheaper and tinier aircraft weighing only 26 pounds named “Laima” that used a wing manufactured for a model glider had successfully crossed the Atlantic in August 1998. He says; it was the smallest plane to have ever crossed the Atlantic. In fact, it was the first unmanned plane of any size to have done so. The plane flew by itself solo from one side of the ocean to a particular spot on the other side. Instead of a compass and stars to steer by, it had a microprocessor and a global positioning system (GPS) receiver. Once in the air, the Laima droned along at a cool 75 mph. It took about 25 hours to make the flight and used up only 1.5 gallons of gasoline during its trip of slightly over 2000 miles.

Laima was the brainchild of the Insitu Group, led by Dr. Tad Mc Greer. For now, the Laima is intended to collect and store standard weather information such as temperature, wind speed and direction, rainfall, barometric pressure, precipitation, and relative humidity. Once in the terrorists hand an airplane such as Laima’s potential for destruction is immense. Small things are hard to find when you are zipping by them at 300 mph or more in a modern fighter plane. The worrying part is as Jef says; a modern jet interceptor would find it hard to see such small airplanes that fly so slowly.

Laima’s engine was a medium-sized model aircraft engine, but Jeff says, you could loft an A-bomb with a readily available model motor that is only a bit larger, about the size of a petrol engine from a lawn mower. Lawn mower engines themselves will do; many radio-controlled planes are flown with propellers attached where once a grass-slicing blade had been. And, there is not much difference between spinning a cutting blade over a lawn and swishing a propeller through the air, except for that wonderful just-mown aroma you get from the lawn, he says.

True, the Laima was packed with current technology; but the aircraft is not super-high-tech. It was certainly cheap compared to piloted aircraft, or even compared to the remote-piloted vehicles the military uses such as UAVs our military use. To put it in financial perspective, our recently procured second hand MIG 27 cost just over 5 million dollars a peace. And, the infrastructure required to operate them; such as airfields and hangers etc are considerable.

Moreover, as we have witnessed by recent LTTE attack, they could be easily targeted. The Laima by compression had been built for under $10,000. And, a hundred-foot-long stretch of road or farm field would serve to launch it. Except the nerve gas or a small atom bomb it could carry, there is nothing esoteric or hard to buy. As the world learned in a Japanese subway decades ago, it is easy to make nerve gas. Time and again LTTE not only proved it has the nerve and the will to make such deadly material but also to use them too.

Anybody can walk into a store in Singapore or the US and purchase a GPS unit with a computer interface. Servos powerful enough to operate the controls are racked up in rows on hobby store shelves. Small portable computers are available anywhere, and for this application, not much brain power is required. Modern, non-mechanical gyros that can keep a plane flying straight and level through turbulent skies now sell for under $100. They, too, are a standard hobby-store item. Not so sophisticated programmer could write the code, and since nerve gas doesn't have to be delivered with 1-meter precision, the GPS and a few gyros can handle all the piloting and navigational needs. A generator, driven by the motor, can supply the electricity that the computer and other electronics require.

For a million dollars, which is not a lot of money for LTTE, could build a hundred of the cruse-missile like bomb carriers. They could do this in a secluded building the size of a two-car garage. That's not the kind of site that our UAV’s look for as ammunition dumps or training camps. If 100 deadly Laima's were launched nearly simultaneously, it would be impossible to find them all even if you knew that they were coming. It is hard to conceive of an effective defense against such attacks. Flying above 2000 feet or so, they are invisible to the naked eye on the ground, and completely inaudible. So there could not be any 116 calls until the last moment.

Such an autonomous LTTE bomb-carrier with a lethal pay load would need less than 1 lt. gasoline to fly from Wanni to Colombo or anywhere in Sri Lanka. It could be during the day or night. If scramble some of our K-firs or Mig27 jets after such an intruder; it is doubtful our pilots at their high speeds see them from their cockpits before their kamikaze dive. Like cruse missiles these pilot-less airplanes need not return to its base.

Our assets are vulnerable to sneak attacks by LTTE. It is only few days back that Tamil Chelvam barked to unleash all their might against us. Gotabhaya Rajapakse is right; to be safe, we have to fish out all LTTE assets wherever and what ever they may be. Sooner we finish the job the better for all of us.

The military implications of small, inexpensive, self-piloting vehicles have not been ignored by the US military. The hot items these days are tiny airplanes and choppers that are a few inches across and can carry cameras and other sensors into a battle zone and maneuver their electronic eyes around and even into buildings. Special units of US marines are trained to use them effectively. They are cheep in comparison to UAVs. A few years back, Discovery television program put these items in some prospective. No doubt, our forces too could use small airplanes and the related technology to a great extent in our efforts to liberate the Tamil people from the clutches of the LTTE terrorists.