the 'Stinger' threat

In the 1980's when the Soviets had a large military force in Afghanistan the CIA armed the Mujahideen with FIM-92 Stinger missiles. These missiles are portable easy to carry and can be fired from the shoulder at low flying warplanes and helicopters.

These weapons were used but not very much appreciated by the Mujahideen who are reported as saying they weren't half as good as they were made out to be.

When the Soviets pulled out the US made desperate attempts to try and buy back all of the Stingers still in the hands of the rebels, apparently several hundred were left in the rebels handed since the war with the Soviet Union ended in 1988, they were described as easy to use as a point and shoot camera by an intelligence officer and were being handed out to the rebels like candy during their fight against the Soviets.

Thirteen years afterwords the United States and Britain launched a war into Afghanistan, there was a fear at the beginning of this war that the Taliban would use some of these weapons primarily during the initial aircraft sorties which consisted of 25 F/A-18 Hornets launched from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.



However no such attack even happened and no missiles were even fired at coalition aircraft (that we know of), so are these Stingers and other such loose MANPADS a real threat to civil aviation?

An SA-7 portable SAM like the Stinger (although not half as good) hit the left wing of a DHL Airbus A300 cargo plane taking off from Baghdad which resulted in a fire and complete loss of hydraulic flight control systems.
However the plane luckily managed to land safely.

Other such attacks have downed several coalition helicopters in Iraq but no major aircraft, and it is unknown whether these portable SAM's originated from Afghanistan (more than likely most if not all were carried out with regular RPG's or SA-7's).



However what did grab my attention a few weeks ago was when in New York City a group of Americans had acquired a Stinger missile and said they would shoot down a commercial airliner, however they were arrested by the FBI and the Stinger was found to be inoperable.

So the Stinger threat that is often cited as an improbable threat, an examaple of how easy it is to create scary scenarios out of whole cloth, but what could be a threat would be Iranian made MANPADS.



It was often rumored that some of these such Stingers were neither smuggled or simply given to Iran, and that Iran could simply reverse engineering the technology to make their own variant, while I'm not aware of such Stinger variants the Iranians do make their own MANPADS named Misagh-1 and 2. The Misagh-1 is an all-aspect passive infrared homing system. It is a variant of the Chinese QW-1 Vanguard missile system, the Misagh-2 is an upgraded version with an infrared seeker, an effective range of 5000 meters, a maximum altitude of 3500 meters and a maximum velocity of Mach 2.

These weapons would be very dangerous in the hands of terrorists and would do more than sting helicopters and larger airliners when they are taking off and landing!

While no such weapons have been used by the Iraqi insurgency as of writing it is a possibility and much more credible and dangerous than the Stinger threat that has been looming under commercial aircraft for the past 20 years!