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Evacuation planes using combat landings, decoy flares at Kabul airport
Evacuation planes landing in Kabul to rescue US citizens and Afghans are taking no chances — they’re making nose-dive combat landings and deploying decoy flares to ward off potential missile attacks. One French Air Force A400M taking off from the beleaguered airport launched a half-dozen flares moments after takeoff, footage from ITV Turkey posted by CBS News shows. The flares are designed to draw heat-seeking missiles away from the aircraft. (nypost.com) 更多...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
No civilian aircraft are landing in Kabul. Just military aircraft
As purely a civilian who loves flying and had a dad in Vietnam, I'm curious what the success rate is of those decoy flares? I'm dreading the next 5 days until we can get out, even though I support the mission to stop.
There have been multiple generations of shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles, called MANPADS (Man Portable Air Defense Systems). The later generations are much harder to decoy with flares. Fortunately, from what I've read terrorist groups tend to have older generation MANPADS, which can be fooled by multiple simple flares and advanced multi-spectral flares. Nevertheless, it's not a risk one wants to take. The real threat is from ISIS-K and while a suicide bomber can hide in a crowd, MANPADS are large and weigh about 30 lbs. So they are much harder to conceal from the Taliban, which is a mortal enemy of ISIS-K.
It is still amazing that we don't have weekly reports of shoulder launched heat seeking missiles hitting military and commercial planes from terrorist groups in many locations in Middle East and elsewhere. Even the older generations of missiles would still hit a target sometimes.
Hi Brenda ! Are we related??
I read that the biggest problem is currently small arms fire which unfortunately combat landings and flares may not help avoid.