Military airliner derivatives and the risk of confusion

But while researching the article and attending various briefings on the P-8 as well as the Wedgetail AEW&C aircraft, a thought kept niggling away in the back of my mind – are there any dangers of producing armed or high value ISR versions of popular commercial airliners? Traditionally military aircraft, especially those capable of employing weapons, have been specially designed and bore little resemblance to any commercial types.

In fact, there have been few really successful military derivatives of commercial airliners over the years. The P-3 Orion was a modified version of Lockheed’s Electra airliner which itself sold in modest numbers, and of course there have been air-to-air tanker, military transport and ISR versions of aircraft such as the 707, DC-10, 747, 757 and many different bizjets over the years. However, few have been armed, and their missions were arguably not considered as high value as they are in today’s networked environment.

With the advent of the P-8/EP-8, the 747 based Airborne Laser (ABL – which may or may not ever enter service), and increasingly high value ISR, AEW&C and even ‘smart tanker’ assets based upon commercial airframes ranging from the Cessna Caravan to the 747 in size, where once tankers and transports were probably thought to be comparatively low value targets to a potential enemy, these latest aircraft, many of which are armed, are probably rightly considered fair game in any combat scenario. This then brings up the danger and the dilemma of operating these high-value military assets alongside thousands of their commercial cousins flying daily around the world.

In September 1983, the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 flying from Anchorage to Seoul over the island of Sakhalin north of Japan, with the loss of 269 passengers and crew. While they initially denied any knowledge of the incident, the Soviets later admitted they had shot the 747 down because it was off course and flying in prohibited airspace, and they had suspected it of being on a spy mission. While that sounds absurd these days, the Cold War was at a new peak in 1983 and tensions between the West and the Soviet bloc were high.

Let’s fast forward to a hypothetical scenario set in the early 2020s. A pro-separatist government has just won power in Taiwan and has been appealing to the international community to support its plans to formally declare its independence from Beijing. China responds by conducting high level air defence and naval exercises with its newly-launched aircraft carrier in and around the Taiwan Strait.

Meanwhile, a Taiwanese commercial 737-800 takes off an hour late from Taipei bound for Hong Kong with 170 passengers on board, at a time when the Chinese fleet is at a high state of alert having been intermittently shadowed by Japan based US Navy EP-8s, Global Hawks and submarines attempting to harvest as much SIGINT and ELINT about the new vessel as possible.

Sticking to its flightplan and staying within the air route, the Taiwanese 737 is on a direct course to overfly the Chinese fleet which, for a military aircraft, would be considered an overly aggressive move. An over-zealous and ambitious Chinese destroyer commander tracks the 737 and, not seeing it on his commercial schedule and so perhaps understandably thinking it’s another EP-8 which he knows to carry air-launched UAVs and air-to-surface missiles, decides to warn the aircraft off. The ship transmits its warning on international military frequencies (but not those used by commercial ATC), but the 737 doesn’t respond. At the same time a US submarine has been noted in the area and tension is high. As the 737 nears, the Chinese commander takes matters into his own hands and decides to fire upon the ‘EP-8’, with predictable and horrible consequences.

A unlikely scenario? Perhaps politically, but we’ve it happen before in 1988 at the height of the Persian Gulf ‘Tanker War’. The cruiser USS Vincennes, while being harassed by Iranian gunboats, shot down a climbing Iran Air A300 thinking it was a diving Iranian F-14 Tomcat attacking it, with the loss of 290 passengers and crew! The Vincennes was one of the first ships to operate the then new and much-vaunted Aegis combat system, yet human error, procedural breakdown, and the actions of a reportedly overly-aggressive captain ruled the day.

To be fair to Boeing, the 737 isn’t the only commercial airframe being ‘militarised’. Witness the large number of ISR versions of the venerable Beech King Air, a plethora of new and highly capable ISR variants of the Gulfstream V/550 and Bombardier Global Express bizjets, and even Hellfire-toting Cessna Caravans entering service as low cost attack aircraft. Does the proliferation of such derivatives mean another KAL007 or Vincennes is inevitable next time a chain of command breaks down? n