By Karim Attia
I was sat on a train, thoughts meandering, when one of them, bizarrely, developed into the concept for an anti-aircraft weapon. One of the problems with most anti-aircraft weapons is that, to be effective, they have to hit a very fast and manoeuvrable target and cause it enough physical damage that it can no longer operate effectively.
My concept would allow a weapon to be effective without the need for actually hitting the target.
I envisage a pretty standard delivery platform (seeking missile of Surface to Air, or Air to Air, type) that detonates/deploys within the vicinity of the target aircraft. The weapon element would be an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) to disable the electronics of the target aircraft.
As aircraft, particularly military ones, become ever more reliant on electronics (fly-by-wire avionics, weapons systems, radar, communications, etc) they become ever more vulnerable to their destruction, or failure, making EMP ever more effective. Although ‘hardening’ against EMP is possible, it is not general practice, even in military hardware.
The obvious problem is generating sufficiently powerful EMP from a weapon system that has to be small and light (EMP is an effect of nuclear detonations but can be replicated with chemical-based weapons). Indeed, until the ...
